Black Flies and Bush Planes

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2011-08-14T13:24:00.001-07:00

Went out the other day on a flight to Fort Liard, and ended up holding for most of the day in the community.

It was hot, like 30 degrees hot, and I had dressed for a relatively cool morning and still in bug-protection mode. ( pants and at best, a long sleeve shirt wit the sleeves rolled up )

I did get the opportunity to hang out a little bit with the husband of a husband-and-wife team that manned the Fort Liard Community Aerodrome Radio Station. They had an interesting story of getting on during a hirinjg blitz for the 2010 Olympics and after it was over, their pick of a few interesting spots in the North. ( My suspicion is that if you are the type of person who finds places like these in the north interesting, you probably get your pick of the litter. I tend to agree, but I'm sure the vast majority most likely feels otherwise...

It was a nice little airport setup, with all the basic airport-things you need. A little building, a parking lot, some radio gear, maybe a nav-aid and some runway lighting. A bathroom, a few chairs and magazines in a waiting room, a run-up pad and a hangar.

From left to right, the instruments and radio gear are;

A Wind Direction indicator
A Wind Speed Indicator
Dual Altimeters ( For giving out Altimeter settings )

The wind direction/intensity indocators are the two big black dials on the far left. I always thought that the wind information they gave you was averaged out, but apparently not in a place like this, as I asked him after watching him give out an advisory to a helicopter. Maybe thats an ATIS thing?

The CARs operators get a fair bit of downtime while on shift and manning their posts, so these places are usually pretty clean and this one was no exception. Its the unattended ones that tend to be a little on the grotty side...

I got the grand tour and was surprised to find this bad boy lurking in the closet.

This is the NDB, the electronic guts of the airports only functioning nav-aid.

a Non-Directional Beacon is typically a fairly low-power AM transmitter, usually located at the airport or a short distance away and I've always been told is the most common up here, mostly due to the low-maintenance and low-cost to setup. Imagine my surprise when I found the W.O.P.R in the closet, pumping out random 1974 computer noises and a vicious amount of BTU's that their poor little window-mounted air conditioner couldn't even pretend to keep up with.

In my mind, I had always imagined a little box, about the size of a portable radio!

We live in interesting times in the field of Air Navigation. The use of GPS as a primary aid is quickly catching on. Costs for certified installations are dropping and the number of approaches available to those who choose to invest in the hardware and the training, get the comfort of an approach more accurate by a factor of ten than what you can do with this one.

In fact, I probably shouldn't say this out loud, but I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of aircraft and pilots, flying around with un-certified GPS setups in their aircraft, to an airport with an NDB, are using the GPS to tell them where the beacon is as opposed to the ADF ( radio reception gear for the NDB ) and maybe sparing a glance over at the poor little ADF needle bobbing and weaving around from time time as a back-up.

After hanging out at the airport for a few hours, I decided to brave the heat and go for a little stroll around the village. I managed to find a route that followed mostly the shady side of the street and made my way down to the river to have a peek. Its a nice little town, lots of old-school log cabin type structures, right in the middle of the village, and right alongside modern stucco-sided ranchers.

One woman had a food-stand type of mobile trailer set up on her front lawn. It wasn't open, but looked like the "mobile" part of the setup had long since stopped being an option and she had hunkered down to sell burgers and fries off her front lawn. Great idea, but good luck trying to float something like this with the zoning folks down south!

Thanks are due to my Mother, who gave me the tip of reducing file size to try and get photos posted on here. I went from an avewrage of a meg or two per picture and a good five or ten minute wait on the upload, to a couple hundred kilobytes and a 10 second upload time!

Back in business.

Its kind of too bad, I really looked forward to doing a bit more posting this summer, but a couple things have conspired against me.

One was the photo issue. I love posting pics, even just to look back at myself. The upload time made posting a bit of a drag and I stopped altogether for awhile.

The other issue is that now that I am flying passengers around, and living and working in such a small community, I'm a lot more aware of how posting details that could identify my customers or my employer, might not be such a good idea in the general business sense. Or not, I might just be a little paranoid or self conscious...

Anyhow, to try an catch up, here are a few pics and a few littler adventures of late;

Went fishing a few weeks ago. Had a weekend off and nothing to do, so I threw my fishing stuff in the car, packed a little cooler with lunch and drinks and hit the road. I'd seen a decent lake a couple hours drive away and a river that connected to it that was purported to have a set of waterfalls on it.

Fishing was pretty goo, a lot more fishing jumping then biting it seemed. The dragon-fly's were out in abundance and were doing their clumsy mating flying down close to the surface of the river and I suspect thats what the fish were feeding on. When they mate, they are joined together but still manage to fly around, just not with very much precision. I imagine from below the waters surface a pair of conjoined dragonflys buzzing the rivers surface and/or occasionally getting stuck in the water, is a decent target.

The little spot where I was fishing had one other fisherman when I got there. He told me he had seen a bear across the river an hour earlier. A half hour or so after I showed up, we could hear it walking/ crashing its way through the bush on the other side of the river. I eventually did see him a little later on, as he came free of the trees and found a spot in the tall grass along the river to lie down in.

Also happened to turn my head and see a family of mink? weasels? crossing the river about forty feet behind me. They were pretty quiet, so I only noticed them by fluke.

After fishing for a few hours with moderate success ( 4 little Northern Pike and 1 decent sized Walleye ), I popped in to see the falls on my way back to town.

The falls were pretty spectacular to see. I think there are three sets of falls on two seperate rivers all close by up here and all worth a look.

Was a little nervous about wandering around the footpaths, as there were bear warning signs up and no one around but me. In my fishing tackle box I have a little bell that you can clip to the tip of your rod in case you are throwing out a baited hook and then sitting back waiting for the fish to bite. It also doubles as a good little bear-bell, clipped to my pants pocket and ringing away with each stride. Grizzly bears in the area can be readily identified by the presence of such bells in their spoor.

If you look closely at the top of the falls on the right hand side of the picture, there is a little rock just before the falls themselves.

Closer inspection reveals that it is a little inukshuk-type structire built by some pretty brave/stupid people.

The countdown is officially on, as I will be leaving to go home to the West Coast for the winter in less than two weeks. I've got a good little stockpile of pictures, so perhaps I'll get the motivation to post some more on here once I'm back in the land of unlimited high-speed internet.

Looks Okay.

2011-07-05T19:15:00.000-07:00

Got up for my first revenue flight with passengers today for my new employer. I took a fellow up to a little northern community called Lutsel k'e as the
regional Dene organization is having it's annual general meeting. It's
held in a different community in the region every year and this year
it was Lutsel k'e's turn.

I am actually typing this on my Iphone sitting in the little terminal building as I am "holding" here for a couple hours while I await my passenger to finish up at the meeting and then bring him back to town.

Flight up was good, exactly an hour and a half. There was a little
bit of low cloud and rain on my departure and it started to look iffy,
but quickly cleared up and it was high cloud for the rest of the trip.

The direct route would have taken me out over the lake, a good 20 or
30 miles from shore but given the limited visibility and low ceilings
in the rain, I opted to stick to the shoreline so I would have a good
visual reference to the ground as I ducked under the first little bit
of clag.

On arrival near CYLK, I heard a medevac call on the radio from an Air
Tindi plane as he tried to get ahold of the local Community Aerodrome
Radio Service (CARS station). I thought they'd be open based on the
airport entry in the CFS, but he got no answer that I could hear.

( The CFS is the Canada Flight Supplement, a small book about the size of a brick and approximately the same weight. The pages are the super-thin newsprint variety that you might find in say, a bible. Published anew every 56 days, it lists the details of every Aerodrome in Canada. I've always thought it to be more than a bit silly in this day and age to being wasting so much paper, but hey, two expired CFS's make a great set of chocks for your planes tires, so its not like they cant be recycled.... )

Sometimes while flying, you only get to hear one side of the
conversation as an airborne transmitting radio has much greater range
than a ground station, since our radios are VHF and limited to line of
sight.

I got within 20 miles and made my own call to the CARS station and got silence from them as well, guess no ones home...

The Tindi aircraft called me up directly and gave me their ETA as only a
minute or two before mine, so I let him know I'd wait for him to land
before I started into the airport zone. He was using a Medevac call sign,
so he had priority over me as far as I was concerned. He was doing a
straight-in approach to the runway I expected to be the active based
on the winds reported at the field before I left. I stayed about four
miles away from the airport on the "dead" side and waited till I saw
him on the runway before I turned in to start my own straight in
approach for runway 08.

For an airport with no ground station (since they were apparently
closed), an arriving aircraft will usually cross overhead the field to
have a look at the windsock and determine the runway is clear and
which runway is more into wind for the landing. Since the Tindi pilot
had established that for me, and given me a wind report once he
landed, I simply followed him in instead of crossing goer and circling
back around for the landing. Its always appreciated to pass it on to anyone else coming in as it saves a lot of unnecessary maneuvering at low altitude and airspeed.

Taxiied in and conveniently there was two sets of concrete pads.

Most airports of this size that I have been to, only have one pad, so
that was a bonus. Since most of he airports up here are gravel runways
and taxiways, they usually have at least one concrete pad that we can
park with our props over top of so that on start up we don't pick up
little rocks and beat little dents into our props. You still have to
have a look at the pad before start up as you will often have to sweep
the area just under and ahead of your prop as there is usually a couple
little rocks hanging around.

Once we landed and my passenger went off to town I went into the
little terminal building, called back to head office to report my
arrival and had a little of my lunch I brought.

The Tindi medavacs patient showed up along with a nurse from the
health station. After she was done loading up she drove up to where I
was standing and let me know that if I was sentenced to hang out for
the whole day here, I was more than welcome to come down to the health
centre and watch TV.

Apparently, that's what all the pilots who hold
here do. Very nice of her to offer, but I brought my fishing rod and
was still thinking of walking down to the lake. After she left and I
started typing this out on my phone, I realized I had already killed
an hour and decided it might be better if I stuck around. My passenger
mentioned he would try and get done sooner rather than later and it
might even be less than a two hour hold.

Another Tindi plane, this time a dash-7 came in and I briefly worried
that he wouldn't have room to get around me. Once the medevac plane had
left, I ended up being parked in the middle of the ramp. He had lots
of room though and only stopped long enough to shut down two engines
on one side and let two people off and then they blasted off.

The CARS guy had shown up just before the dash-7, which I imagine is
the "sched", and as soon as they taxied onto the runway and he had let
them know that there was "no reported traffic ", I heard the radio
click off and off he went, back to town till the next scheduled flight
I bet... Haha. Actually, he ended up coming back fifteen minutes after I typed that and was there for the rest of the time, including my departure.

My coworker pointed out as well that this airport is in the Northern Domestic Airspace, and as such, its runway designation is in degrees True, as opposed to Magnetic.

The runway sign indicated that this is Runway 078T instead of the traditional 08. I also just realized, usually these signs depict BOTH runways, as in a runway designated as 08 ( magnetic heading somewhere between 075 and 085, I can't remember how they round up or down, so forgive me if this is wrong. ) will also be runway 26, as the opposite end of the runway can be used as a "different" runway if departing the other way. So these signs, usually say " 08 - 26 " or " 07 - 25 ", but this ine only indicates ONE runway, even though I know for a fact the other end is a perfectly useable and legal runway. Odd.

Lining up to land here, your magnetic compass would indicate a direction of about 053 degrees.

Back at base I had another flight of similar length waiting for me, but it ended up getting pushed over to tomorrow morning as the winds at my destination were starting to get a little hectic and there was little real urgency for the flight to happen that day.

We had about a 15 knot headwind on the way up here, and going home I snuck up a little higher and ended up picking up 25 knots directly on the tail to get home a lot faster than the trip up.

In good form as well, I traded fuel for speed on the way up so that I wasn't lingering too long in the headwind scenario and on the way back I throttled it back a little to get back the fuel I burnt on the way up and let the wind do more of the work.

Air Tindi was pretty busy today too it seems. I heard two Tindi palnes talking on their way to a Lodge outside of yellowknife, before they took their conversation " company" ( over to a private company frequency ). Got back to base and looking at the news, it would appear one of those planes was most likely carrying the Royals...cool.

I noticed this instrument right outside the terminal building as well. I've seen them in other places, but never hada chance to take a picture. I THINK it's used for measung the height of a cloud layer for their weather reports, but I'm not 100% on that. It kind of looks like an old sextant.

I got to fly this leg the other day, even though you might say we had a " passenger ". This fellow is known as a "hummer" as sometimes in commercial air cargo they will get a little sticker that says " HUMR "....that stands for Human Remains.

They always indicate somewhere on the box which side is the Head, as it is fairly important that it always be kept "head-up if there is any incline in loading / unloading or transport. I am told this is to keep the embalming fluids from pooling in the head.... In this case, we received the box with only two notations on it, one on each end and they both said " legs "...sigh..... We opened up a corner to see if there was any other way to tell, but everything is well wrapped up, and I was NOT opening things any further.

I took a few photos with my phone today, hoping the lower resolution pics would translate to faster upload times, but no dice. Its still pretty darn slow....

I will call you Betty, and Betty, you can call me Captain.

2011-07-03T19:59:00.001-07:00

Finally got my PPC Ride today.

We've been trying to book it for a little over two weeks and its been frustrating for everyone, my employer included. Its a fairly short season already and to be limited to freight runs and tagging along for empty legs has me feeling a little less than useful at some points.

But that's all out of the way as of this morning, I passed my PPC ride and can now fly the C337, aka The Push/Pull as pilot-in-command for both passengers and freight runs. admittedly, the work that they have for this plane is somewhat less than the Caravan, however, with my training and flight test out of the way on the C337, its on to the Caravan training now.

It's kind of funny in some respects, as the C208 Caravan only requires that I be trained to a PCC standard and no PPC ride is required to act as PIC with passengers under Day VFR.

Funny, because in my mind, the Caravan is a more complicated aircraft, is larger, and being on amphibious floats, has a couple more features that require some training on.

I'll back it up a little for the non-aviation folks reading along.

A PPC is a Pilot Proficiency Check. Its a Flight Test ( A " Ride ", abbreviated slang for CheckRide ), conducted by either a Transport Canada Inspector or an Authorized Check Pilot. In larger companies, you may have one of your own pilots conducting the Ride as an ACP, but for most people ( I think ), you'll consult the list of available ACP's in your area and work your way through the list till you find one who is available and qualified for the particular ride you are after. Quite often, the person will be an employee of one of your competitors.

I don't know if it happens or not ,but I suspect, that one might be a little hesitant to look at ACP's in your immediate locale, as they will be your competitor and the perception of bias would be hard to avoid... I'm sure 99% of them are objective and fair, but I can't help but think the perception might be enough..

A PPC is sort of like a license for a particular aircraft, but not quite a type rating. If you hold a valid PPC, say, for the Space Shuttle, you could, in theory, go over to the other Space Shuttle operators in your neighborhood and get a job with them. The fact that you have passed aircraft-specific training and a flight test, allows them to greatly abbreviate your training program and save a bucket load of money.

So... side-note here but worth mentioning, it would appear that some pilots, hell-bent on career progression, would abuse this process and have Company A train them, get their PPC and promptly quit to go work for Company B, now that Company B will actually deign to return their calls hiring them will save them thousands ( I'm not even joking here.. ) of dollars in training.

If you read AvCanada, you would come to the conclusion that this is the rule rather than the exception that I suspect it is. Perhaps I'm an optimist, but I tend to take things from that site more than a sprinkling or too of salt...

Because of the above, some companies have started demanding new-hires undertake a " bond " to ensure they stick around long enough to make training them worthwhile, or even have them cough up cash up front upon being hired and having it repaid to them slowly over the length of their indentured servitude.

In any case, that's a PPC, a notation on your license that says you can carry passengers, for hire, in a specific ( usually multi-engine ) aircraft, for hire.

A PCC, on the other hand is a Pilot Competency Check. Semantics you might think, but substantially less stringent training protocols and the flight test is usually at the end of your training where instead of sending you off to a date with a transport Canada Inspector for a flight test, the chief pilot fills out a piece of paper and says, ok, you're good to go. No Flight test, per se, although I'm sure most do a test of sorts. But mostly, training you to competency and then signing you off.

A PCC is non-transferable in the way a PPC is. If you walk over to a competitor, they still have to do all the same training to issue you a company-specific PCC, there is little advantage to hiring someone with a PCC. ( Other than the fact that they probably have some experience )

Most single engine aircraft do not not require a PPC, only a PCC, to fly under Day VFR conditions with passengers.

Enter the C208 Caravan. Legally, a single-engine plane. Although much larger than the little multi-engined C337. Turbine to boot as well, which is actually quite nice to operate. I guess easier too as well in most respects, but like engine heating/cooling for piston engined aircraft, a turbine has its own gotcha's that need to be monitored and handled as well.

In my mind, a much larger, more complicated aircraft. But legally, I've already done the hard part on the little C337. In theory, the training for the PCC on the Caravan, should be easier, if you read into it the apparent spirit of the regulations, having assigned it the less stringent regimen of PCC training instead of PPC.

My employer says I have it wrong, the Caravan is a much easier plane with much more docile handling attributes, is simple to operate and " just a big 172 ". I agree with him in some respects, my flying experiences on it so for, about a half dozen hours, have been pretty surprisingly easy. Hard to get over the size of the thing though, up a dozen feet in the air on the amphibious floats.

Even in the cockpit, the thing is big. Your own seat with plenty of legroom, no shoulder rubbing with your copilot and your own heating, ventilation, controls, instruments and even your own door, haha.

Amphibious, because it has floats that have a set of retractable landing gear hidden up inside them, allowing you to retract the wheels and land it on water as a float plane, or extend them and land on a runway. This part I like. Lots of water around here and very few runways, the floats definitely give you a few more options in the event of.

Anyhow, back to my story...

So we finally nail down an ACP to do my ride, it was booked a few days ago for early this monring in another town, about an hour and a bit flight away.

Two days of refreshing my head with the book stuff and I think there was a flight as well that I went along on for the empty leg home to keep fresh on flying the thing.

Up early this morning and I made myself eat breakfast, even though I often skip breakfast, particularly feeling a little nervous as I did this morning.

Not that the flight test was a " jeopardy event ", with failure bringing and immediate end to my employment, but the time, expense and delay in getting this test arranged was fairly substantial for my employer. To go home, do some remedial training, rebook and go back to do another one would be...uneconomical at best and a complete waste of time at worst, given the short length of the busy season up here.

Gather up all my current charts, maps and supplements. Check the plane out from head to toe and fuel it up and top off the oil. Double check I have all my training records, license, medical, lucky troll doll and am wearing clean underwear.

Check, check and roger that.

I did up and printed off a copy of our Operational Flight Plan ( OFP ) as it has navigation details, weight and balance information, fuel calculations, time enroute and a few other details. I'm hoping that if I am asked to do a Navigation Exercise, like planning a simulated trip with a simulated cargo/passenger load, I can forstall the drudgery of going through all the calculation minutiae by showing the examiner how we can simply and easily do it all with a spreadsheet, instead of a #2 pencil, a wizwheel a bunch of charts, graphs and performance calculations.

I know this sounds lazy, but here's the deal.

I know my aircraft can perform suitably well, tolerably even, with as little as 2000 feet of runway, fully loaded and a warm day.

So.

If I get sent somewhere that has 5000 feet of hard-surfaced runways to pick up one guy and the temperature isnt anything crazy... I probably will not get out the performance charts and graph it all out.

If the runway was 1500 feet, sure, you bet.

If it was 30 degrees out, yeah, absolutely.

Same goes for the navigation log. If I'm doing the same trip over and over to the same place, I know how long it takes. I know how much fuel I expect to burn. I know the track distance between a few major landmarks, and if my GPS went T/U, I could pull off a groundspeed check without too much trouble.

Block fuel burns and standard power settings eliminate the need for a lot of the foo-far-ah as well. I can calculate them in my head, revise as is necessary.

It was all a moot point however, as the examiner wasn't interested in much of that stuff at all.

The ground portion was an oral exam on the aircraft itself and our companies operations manual and company-specific policies and procedures. I knew the majority of the aircraft stuff off the top of my head, but looked up two items in the book ( I'm allowed to do that ) that I had even the slightest doubt about.

A couple quick calculations to show I actually knew how to use the performance charts and we were off for the air portion.

Again, this was mostly demonstrating proficiency with this specific aircraft. Little time was wasted on testing me on things that frankly, I have already been tested on, several times.

I made a couple errors, notably;

In my steep turns, I gained a bit of airspeed on the first one and my altitude control was sloppy in the second. I eyeballed a power increase for the first steep turn purely out of habit. I've had no trouble with steep turns, even up to 360 degrees around with little or no power increase and losing negligible airspeed, with this airplane.

On the altitude, I was a bit flustered by what looked like a fatal 10 mph airspeed increase on the first one that I sloppily dove into the second one, starting out 50 feet higher than I should been.

Then the Single-engine overshoot, that is, a simulated approach to landing, conducted at altitude, the examiner calls for an overshoot or go-around at a couple hundred feet above your simulated runway altitude and then fails an engine mid-overshoot, close to the ground. I managed to get the engine failure and feathering drill down in a timely fashion, but let my airspeed increase away from best-rate and ended up leveling off at a pretty low altitude while I got the engine feathered and then noticed I wasn't climbing due to wasting airspeed on forward motion instead of using it to climb my wounded bird away from the simulated trees. I got it done within limits, barely.

A couple other small items and the examiner commented that the ride was well done and I had passed.

All in all, I was pleasantly surprised at how comfortable I felt with the ride and the lack of busy-work, that, as I mentioned before, I have already been tested on and could do again if required, but were not all that applicable to an aircraft-specific proficiency check.

All of this being done during the " Debrief " session after the flight of course. Or as my Chief Pilot who sat in on the debrief called it " the ass-reaming ".

I flew us home and that was that. Glad that's out of the way, looking forward to heading out on my own for a few trips now.

We have a " Court Party " trip tomorrow, where we fly an entire courtroom, judge, prosecutor, crown defender, sheriff and court stenographer out to a remote community to conduct a few trials in the local community hall.

In the afternoon, we get started on a large project freight-haul where have a dozen or more loads staged in our yard for transport to another remote community. A good chunk of the load is steel plates that are stupid-heavy and a full load will look comical, being just a single inch-thick layer on the floor of the plane. The plane will look completely empty at maximum gross weight. These will be in the caravan so hopefully I'll get some stick time towards my PCC training over the next week as well.

Sorry I am not able to post much for pictures these days. My internet connection is limited to tethering my PC to my iphone and piggybacking on the 3G signal. Fine for internet browsing, but uploading and downloading things are incredibly slow and frequently crash or time-out.

Happy Fathers Day

2011-06-19T20:33:00.000-07:00

Fathers day today, first one for me as a new Dad. A little melancholy as I'm away from my baby girl and my Lovely Wife. My wife made a great little video for me with TWO wearing an I (Heart) Daddy shirt and we had a nice little chat this morning.

Also a little melancholy as my own Father passed away a few years ago and I'm sure he'd find my present situation entertaining as well. I was actually born not too far from where I am presently employed, up here in Canada's north. During the couple years before and after my birth, he made the trip up here to find work. He was most definitely of the "enlightened" generation, to put it delicately and I always thought it a strange place to go to find work back in the sixties and seventies. He ended up mostly driving a cab, but made at least one foray back here a few years after my birth to do it again and make some income. I guess cab driving paid fairly well back then, who knows.

It was always an interesting conversation point when I was a kid, as to where I was born. Even though we moved away when I was only a few months old, I used to use my birthplace as a bit of a badge of uniqueness. Not so unique now, EVERYONE here is born where I was born...haha.

Was a day off for me as well, as it seems most sundays are around here. More because we dont have a lot of work on sundays than anything else.

First I thought I might go hit up the driving range and hit a bucket of balls. I realized its probably been almost two years since I swung a club. Not that I was any good to begin with, but I'm not going to get any better by not golfing.

I enjoy golfing in much the same way as I do fishing. Its a reasonable excuse to get outside and enjoy the outdoors for a long period of time. If I simply walked back and forth in a park for three hours, people might think it a little odd, same as if I sat on a riverbank and stared at the water for three hours. Luckily, all I have to do is swing a club at a little tiny ball and then go looking for it in the bushes for three hours and people think thats entirely acceptable.

I did in fact, change my mind and went fishing instead. There are a ton of places around here to go fishing, but everyone keeps telling me to go to the same spot. Every time I've been to that spot as well, theres always four or five other people there as well. I've tried a few other spots, with limited success, but have always found good results at "the spot". Not a bad location either, just off the end of the runway. Got to watch the water tankers and bird dogs take off and land a couple times too. Oddly, downwind as well....( the plane in the picture is back-tracking and about to turn downwind for the takeoff. )

Apologies for the crap quality, its an iphone picture, at full zoom, but I was trying to get a shot with the windsock as well.

I'll always remember one of my instructors telling me how she remembered which direction the windsock was indicating. That was, The Tail of the sock, is where you want your tail to be. So the direction it is "pointing", where the pointy end is, is where you want your tail to be pointed. Sounds silly, but it stuck.

Actually, thats kind of funny too, I've met quite a few people over the years who misunderstand the whole taking-off-into-the-wind thing. Non-pilots of course and not an indication of their intelligence, but just kind of a funny assumption that your average person has about how an aircraft and a wing works.

For the non-pilots, we take off into wind as the wing of an aircraft does not give a hoot about the ground beneath it. To the wing, the ground does not exist. It exists only in its own medium, the air. The wing creates lift due to the airflow over it. How it gets that airflow, it also doesnt GARA where it comes from. You could design a giant hand to launch it, a-la paper airplane, you could lead it around by another aircraft that had an enormous fan mounted on it to blow air over its wings, or you could strap a couple engines to it and propel a large mass of air backwards creating a newtonian reaction of forward thrust. All of which are perfectly acceptable, only one of which is actually used, so far. ( there are other ways, like throwing kerosene into a tube with a little fan in it that spins at insane speeds and then light it on fire, but thats another story )

In any case, if an airplane is sitting stationary on the ground and a 10 mph wind is blowing on it ( from the front ), the wing thinks its moving through the air at 10 mph...becuase it is. Its not moving over the ground at 10mph, but remember, the wing doesn't care about the ground, its all about the air.

So, if your wing needs 100mph to generate enough lift to get the rest of the airplane off the ground, then you only need to generate 90 mph of forward motion with the engine(s) if you have a 10mph headwind. The opposite is true for a tailwind, you will need to go 110 mph (on the ground )to get that same 100mph relative airflow over the wing.

This all changes once you are actually in the air, but thats another story too.

In any case, I watched, curious, as the giant aircraft took off, with a tailwind. I think they were on a training flight as they returned pretty quickly, so who knows, maybe there was an operational reason.

It could also be that the tail wind was of little concern to them versus other concerns. Occasionally you might take off downwind as there are obstacles on the into wind end of the runway. Or noise-sensitive areas, or traffic considerations, or any number of other reasons that might necessitate a decision to take off downwind. Particularly if the wind was a minor wind to begin with. Not judging, just noted with curiosity at the time.

I remember too at one point when I first started flying, and noting that the winds aloft can be routinely 40 Kmh at even low altitudes, why do those little fluffy clouds not get ripped apart by the howling windstorm going on up there?? Why do they float along and rarely seem disturbed by all this commotion?

It was explained to me once and it always stuck with me. If you are floating down a river in a Canoe, just hanging out and having a cold beverage, letting the current whip you downstream at 10 mph, its not too crazy. If you look at the shore, its really cruising by, but if you ( irresponsibly, shame on you ) throw your cold beverage can in the river, it will float alongside you peaceful as can be. Like the wing, it GARA what the ground ( shore ) is doing ,while it is in its own medium, doing its own thing. Its all relative.

Did some emergency procedure and single-engine maneuvering training in the push/pull yesterday as well. With one engine out, its actually quite a nice little plane to handle.

Unlike the conventional twin, there is no yaw or controllability issue, only a loss of power. In fact, it can be tricky to determine which engine has done the failing...

In a conventional twin, its usually fairly obvious, the nose is pulling hard to one side and you have to actively work at it to keep it straight with the rudder. The lack of activity on one foot/rudder pedal tells you that is is the side generating zero-thrust. Dead Foot = Dead Engine.

You can check the engine instruments in a conventional twin and they will give you some indication, but they can be a little too subtle. Since the engine is still turning,( because the propeller is spinning in the relative airflow ), the oil pressure might still be up ( ish ) and the engine is still fulfilling its duties as an air pump, so the manifold pressure will not change very much, the alternator might still be generating some electricity, the vacuum pump might still be pumping vacuum. But the prop isn't generating thrust, its actually generating drag, using that relative air to turn the engine. And turning that dead engine is a lot of work. Work that your good engine is now doing and you'd rather dedicate to other tasks, like keeping you in the air.

On the push/pull, since there is no adverse yaw ( that pulling-to-one-side ), the best indicators are the fuel flow gauge and the propeller RPM. The fuel flow gauge is the better of the two as a failed engine eats no fuel, so one engine will register zero fuel flow. ( I know, I'm glossing over partial-power-loss, bear with me )The RPM gauge will still indicate something as the propeller is still spinning, but it should be less than the operating engine. In our training, it was about 300 RPM lower, which isn't much and requires a concerted "look" at the gauge, a glance could easily miss the difference.

That wrapped up my training flights on this aircraft as well, next stop is PPC ride and then I can fly passengers for hire. All I have to do is pass...

Flying in the North

2011-06-12T21:20:00.000-07:00

I wanted to call this, "flying in the arctic ", but then I started thinking it might be a bit pretentious. We didn't really go all THAT far north and frankly, there were still trees around, so I'm not sure it really counts as The Arctic.

It was however, my first time flying into the Northern Domestic Airspace.

Canada of course, is separated into several different types of Airspace and Air Traffic Control Areas. Blanket "Airspace" separations are the Southern Domestic and Northern Domestic varieties. Control Areas are Southern, Northern and Arctic.

The Airspace delineations are primarily due to the different type of navigation required in each. In the Southern, you use Magnetic Tracks and in the North, due to the proximity to the Magnetic north Pole, you use only True Tracks. The Control Area delineations are a little different, but have more to do with how IFR traffic is handled and who handles it. Arctic and Northern control areas see a lot of trans-polar long-haul flights that use our airspace due to great-circle routing between the USA and Europe/Asia.

In the picture above, the airplane is sitting on a small pad of concrete at an otherwise gravel/dirt runway and airport ramp. These are important, as it allows us to start up the engine and/or run it up, without sucking up rocks and beating our poor props to death. Once the aircraft is moving, most of the rocks that get sucked up, go back wards, but while stationary, they tend to take chunks out of the props. The pad should be swept off with a broom if there are rocks on it, but generally they are relatively clean.

In any case, our mission was to take a couple of Power Co. employees up to two different communities so they could do some testing of the local power distribution systems. Specifically, they had a special video camera that sensed heat and they had to take some film of every pole-mounted transformer in these communities. Apparently, when these things develop issues, they give off heat, so they can fix them before they pop. In the words of one of the technicians, " any electrical system having problems, will let you know by giving off heat. "

First leg was about 250 statute miles north and took us over/near the Yellowknife control zone. I talked to them on the radio and let them know we were there as a courtesy and was glad I did. There were several aircraft up in the area doing training flights and one of them was pretty close to us. I think it was a king-air and they were doing IFR training. Most likely, head-down and at high speed.

They weren't in the control zone, so had stopped talking to the tower and tower passed us their callsign and suggested we advise on 126.7 our position. We did, with no response, but stayed with Tower and they kept an eye on things and eventually let us know it looked like they were leaving the area and we could relax. Thats not really what he said, but thats what he meant.

Onto our first community and we held for about an hour and a half in the little airport building. Its actually pretty impressive, considering this town probably has a little over a hundred occupants.

Not much to do here, other than chat, read old fashion magazines littered around the terminal and go poke around and look at an old airplane that was derelict out in the back patch.

I thought it remarkable that this airplane was sitting there for so long and didn't look like it had been too badly vandalized or otherwise abused. I surmised it might have been because of this ancient sticker in the back window, threatening EVEN DEATH for such malfeasance.

Story was that the airplane had an accident here 12 or 15 years ago and had sat here ever since. Either the owner was offered an insurance pay-out to write it off and he accepted, or it had no insurance and the costs to fix it were not worth it.

If the insurance company did pay out on it, then they too decided it wasn't worth doing anything about either and there it sits. Considering what even small aircraft components are worth in their parts values, I'm surprised the insurance company didn't mount some kind of salvage operation. Even if it was to go in there and disassemble the thing, strip it for the most valuable parts and leave the rest.

The techs had a cab pre-arranged to take them into town, which was about three miles from the airport. We overheard the cab driver quoting them 50 bucks a head for the ride, so we decided it wasn't worth tagging along into town.

View from the airport, looking over the bay towards town.

They were only gone for about an hour and half and we loaded back up and blasted off for our next destination. This leg was a bit longer, at almost 350 statute miles.

Had to go around once at the next one as the strip is a little on the short-ish side ( 2000 feet ) and the approach was fudged a little, with a missed touchdown mark and too much speed. Next one was better and we held there for a little over an hour and half as well as the techs did their thing in town.

After that, we had to make a quick hop over to a nearby town ( 90 miles ) to fuel up before we made the final leg back home ( 190 miles ).

At the fuel stop, we fueled up quickly, with one eye kept on an approaching thunderstorm. Just after we finished, the Chief Pilot who was with me, got called into the terminal building and I let the guys know that if this delay was more than 5 minutes, that we would most likely be delayed, waiting for the storm to pass. He was out in less than a minute and we blasted off, leaving the approaching storm behind.

We actually were dodging thunderstorms for most of the second half of the trip, but they were easy to spot and we gave them a wide berth.

Back at base and its put the airplane to bed and do the paperwork for the flight. Almost 6 hours of flying!

On The Road Again

2011-06-11T20:10:00.000-07:00

Well, I finally arrived in my new summer home. I left Vancouver on Monday morning at 0700 and arrived in the north around suppertime on Tuesday.

The first day actually started a few days ago with packing, sorting, cleaning and taking care of all manner of tasks before flying the coop for the summer.

This morning came early with my little girl deciding to get up a full hour before her usual rousing time. Perhaps she was as nervous as me. Unfortunately drinking a bottle of milk worked for her, but not me.

I switched cars with the wife and packed most of my stuff last night, to save ten trips to the parkade at 0600. I usually drive the nicer of our two cars, as I spend considerably more time on the road with my daily commute. For this trip , I took the "other" car. I want to call it our Beater, but it is actually the same year as the "good" car and was almost given to us by a relative, so don't want to risk offending anyone....

The 500 of the 1000 kilometres I drove today were very nice. Other than some fuzziness out the windshield due to what I suspect were my " allergies " acting up on departing my wife and daughter this morning, things were very pleasant. Some early clouds at 0700 leaving home turned to sunshine by 1000.

Just before Jasper, the Check Engine light came on in the car.

Great.

Quick pit stop to check things out and everything that could be checked was normal. Engine wasn’t running hot or anything, all fluids were good and no performance change in the engine. I’m chalking it up to some weird better-get-a-dealer-to-do-an-oil-change timer that needed resetting or a sensor issue. The car lived all of its life down on the coast, so maybe it didn’t like the altitudes I was driving at…who knows. We got the car from a relative for 500 bucks, so it was pretty much a gift. If it had to end its days behind some garage in Blue River while I carried on the trip on the greyhound, so be it.

I also noticed the windshield wipers were pretty badly worn so I picked up a new one in Jasper. Yup, ONE new one. I’m that cheap.

Google maps had me turning off the yellow head highway just before Hinton, but I was considering stopping for the night and figured Hinton would have a little more to choose from in the way of cheap motels then the alternatives up the road. I disobeyed Mssrs. Brin and Page and carried on into Hinton. After fuelling up the car and my belly, I noticed I had a wifi signal in the parking lot of the gas station so took a few minutes to check out the interweb. I was actually getting a little road-weary and was hoping to download an audio-book to keep me entertained for a few hours. I checked the app store and it was mostly Christian audio books and a few old classics, like Tom Sawyer and Sherlock Holmes. The wifi signal wasn’t that great and they were fairly large files, so I skipped it. While rechecking the route on google, it now had me going an altogether different route now that I had gone 20 miles past the original turnoff it had commanded.

The new route had a few more sizable towns and frankly looked a little more direct. Interesting. I also noted that I wasn’t nearly as far into the trip as I thought. I figured Hinton would be at least half-way, but no such luck. If I stopped there, after twelve hours of driving, the next day would be at minimum 14 hours more. There was plenty of daylight left, so I pressed on for Whitecourt.

Whitecourt had me in a cheap motel, The Ritz. I was a little skeptical as there was a pub attached to the Motel, but luckily Monday night wasn’t party time in Whitecourt, so I got a quiet night.

I did have a few concerns about finding a room on the way up. I’ve been through Alberta before and have come across towns that are booked solid with oil workers. Every motel is booked up by 2 pm and any rooms available are double what you would expect to pay.

While I was checking in at the Ritz, another fellow was also checking in and the clerk read him out a 400 dollar-plus bill. My turn came and I asked if there were any rooms available, he replied “ yes, fill this out please :, handing me a check in slip and quickly moving on to the next customer waiting in line before I could ask the rate. I filled out the slip waiting for the other shoe to drop and me having to hand it back over and go sleep in the car. 75 Bucks. Sweet!

Next morning it was greasy spoon breakfast and back on the road. From Jasper on, the highways got progressively smaller and smaller.

At Peace River, I called up to my new employer and checked in so they would know when to expect me in town. A last minute stop to pick up a few things and then the final stretch.

From Peace River north, the highway got quite a bit smaller, but also a lot straighter as well. In fact, there wasn’t much for turns from that point on till the NWT border. Those turns that were there were the same diameter and radius. If you looked at them from an aerial view, I’m pretty sure they made up the two 90 degree corners on a full-section of land, where the highway had to bend around developed farmland.

At the NWT border, I was awaiting the giant sign to take some pictures of my first foray North of 60 since I was a baby. Pulling into the little pull out, I noticed two cars pulling in behind me. As I rooted around in my bag for my camera and a drink, I caught a glimpse of the two guys getting out of the cars and noticed they looked young, white and excited. In the back of my mind I thought, I bet these guys are doing the same thing up here as me.

Sure enough, they were two recent flight college grads moving up North to take ramp jobs with two large air carriers up here. We chatted for awhile and took each others pictures under the big sign. They mentioned they were going to be looking for a place to stay in the town where I was headed, but I was still a little unsure about my accommodations to offer a place to crash. Plus, showing up to my new employers with guests in tow, probably wouldn’t have made the best first impression.

I stopped at a waterfall for a quick peek and they passed me by. I decided if I saw them in town, I’d get a phone number from them and give them a quick call after checking in, to see if it was OK to offer them a place to crash. I didn’t see them again and ended up visiting for awhile anyways, so it was a moot point. I felt bad turning down an opportunity to help these guys out, you never know when connections like these can come in handy…

I gave my new Co. a call when I got into town and was directed out to the hangar at the airport to come and meet everybody. Very nice people, and a nice little setup. I got the tour of the operation and of my new home for the summer.

Voila. Casa Mia.

Its actually quite a nice little setup. I have a great big double bed, a couch and a kitchen table. A microwave, and Oven, a Stove and a fridge/freezer. I was worried that the fridge/freezer would be beer-fridge sized and necessitating buying food in tiny little batches, but it is actually quite ample.
Everything had been cleaned out for me and stocked with all the basics, dishes, linens, cutlery, towels, bedding, toaster, pots and pans.

They took me out for dinner that first night, so I forwent grocery shopping till the next day. Day after that was actually a hockey-game night, so I went over to a coworkers place to watch the game and ended up eating there as well. The night after that, it was over to the bosses place for dinner. So, havent actually done much in the way of cooking. In fact, I think the only supper I’ve actually cooked so far was a soup and sandwich affair.

Didn’t realize it, but we actually have 24 hour daylight up here right now. I kind of thought you had to be a little further north to get this, but I was wrong. Technically, the sun sets, but its more of a twilight, with the sun just below the horizon for an hour or two from like 0130 till 0330. During that time it just looks like a really long sunset, turning to a sunrise. It threw me for a little loop the first few nights, as I’d wake up in the middle of the night and check my watch, thinking it was 6 or 7 by the light, and it turned out to be 3 or 4 in the morning. Hasn’t bothered me so far, but everyone keeps saying that it will. We’ll see.

This is about as dark as it gets.

First few days were a flurry of studying company and aircraft documents and writing all the exams to satisfy my training. In between, I went out with them on a few runs and got to get acquainted with the aircraft. Day one had me “flying” the kingair on a little two hour-return flight and later that afternoon the Caravan.

As I’m not formally trained (yet) on these aircraft, it’s not really “flying” in the legal, loggable, sense or even training, but it was quite a nice surprise to get a couple takeoffs and landings along with the usual straight-and-level orientation flying.

A couple days later it was wrapping up my ground training on the aircraft I will be doing my ride on and the one I will be doing most of my flying in, the Cessna 337 Skymaster.

Behold, “Snoopy”.

The skymaster or 337, is a little bit of an odd aircraft. Its one of very few push-pull configuration twin-engine aircraft in existence that I know of. In fact, there is a special class of Instrument Rating that you get that is pretty much specific to this aircraft only.

You can get a Group 3 IFR, which covers all single-engine airplanes and a Group 1 which covers all ( conventional ) twin-engine airplanes and a Group 2 for this bad boy, specific to this aircraft only. Technically its good for all “ Centre Line Thrust Multi Engine Aircraft “. Of which, I only know of this one.

Technically, the Group 2 also allows me to fly any Group 3 aircraft as well.

In order to carry passengers for hire, I also have to do a Transport Canada flight test or “ ride “ to get what is called a PPC, a Pilot Proficiency Check. Coincidentally, the PPC will also act as an IFR flight test, renewing an existing rating or giving me initial qualification, provided all other requirements are met. I have all the other requirements done, so hopefully over the next few weeks, I will have a fresh instrument rating on my license. There is still the possibility that they will only be doing a VFR PPC for me, as that is 99% of the flying I will be doing, but they said they will try and arrange for me to do an IFR one if they feel I have a reasonable chance of success at challenging it.

So, after finishing off the ground stuff on this aircraft, it was flight training time. Me and the Chief Pilot went out for an hour of my mandated flight training and did a little instrument work, some steep turns, stalls clean and dirty and then back to the airport for some circuits. I got some good feedback from the Chief, who had bucket loads of experience flying up here and in taking in new guys like myself for their first jobs. It’s a different world out here than the one you get introduced to in the flight school universe.

The Caravan and King air flights were also my first time flying a turbine powered aircraft. The Caravan being a single engine and the King air having two turbine engines hanging off the wings.

A few major differences, but the basics are still the same. Set Engine power output, match prop RPM to give you the desired performance. Monitor key temperatures and pressures and don’t exceed key limits.

The KingAir is a pretty sweet machine. Lots of technology and a lot faster than anything I’ve flown before. Very responsive as well and quite a treat to handle.

Got to go to a local fishing lodge as well to run in supplies for them. This is very familiar to me…drums of fuel, groceries and propane.

We were also told that on one run we would picking up two girls who were coming out of the camp. Since they hadn’t even had their first guest yet and these workers were just up there doing all the season-opening chores of opening up a lodge, it’s a bit unusual to be bringing people out.

The story we got when we were loading back up to leave, was that one of them had a family member in the hospital and the other simply didn’t want to stay for the rest of the season without her friend. I wasn’t buying the hospital story for a minute. I think the truth was that they had no idea what they had gotten themselves into and were bailing.

Back at base we phoned a cab for them to go back into town. Getting into the cab one of the girls asked us, “ where’s a good place to stay for the night in town, where we can drink? “.

Hmm. Yeah, or go to the hospital to visit your dying great-uncle.

North of 60

2011-06-03T21:04:00.000-07:00

Sorry I haven't posted lately, small issue with interweb connectivity. Issue being I don't have any yet.

I have packed up and moved north for the summer and arrived at my new summer abode a few days ago..

I'm now living in a trailer out behind the Hangar of a small charter airline in the north . Trailer sounds bad, but it's not, it's actually quite cozy and fully equipped.

I'm surrounded, literally, by some of the coolest airplanes still flying today. Without giving it away, most of these aircraft are recent television personalities.

I'm also knee deep in company training and exams. I finished my multi engine rating a few weeks before heading out on the road and also completed allof the legal requirements for my IFR rating as well. The only thing I need to complete my IFR is a flight test, which will be satisfied by a PPC ride in the aircraft I am slated to do most of my flying this summer in. It remains to be seen how much flying that will be, but the people I am working for are fantastic and have been very up front and honest with me about the whole thing. I am also getting trained on two other aircraft which are substantially larger than anything I've flown to date and both are turbine machines as well.

I'd love to post more details, but I'm typing this on my iPhone and it's not easy. Hopefully I have a decent connection within the next few days or so.

Tick Tock Tick Tock

2011-05-14T19:22:00.000-07:00

Wow, I certainly am feeling the hours and minutes as they pass between between my toes these days.

Two weeks now till I get in the car and point it North.

Yesterday morning was D-Day down at Transport Canada as I went in at 0900 and sat down to the first of two exams, back to back.

The first one I've been studying for over the last five months in between work, raising a newborn and surfing the internet, reading pilot-blogs. The second one, not quite as much. The first exam is for my Instrument Rating, the INRAT exam. I printed off a copy of the study and reference guide from Transports website and have worked my way down the list of recommended reading material and exam topics.

If TC wrote a written exam for driving a car, for example, the study guide might say something like " Steering Pinion Torque Sensing " and after dutifully studying steering design for thirty-some odd hours including the full engineering history, design and practical operation, you would get one of the two following questions:

If turning to the right, the control wheel should be rotated in which direction?

A.) Clockwise
B.) Counter-Clockwise
C.) Both
D.) Up

And you would sigh about all that brain space dedicated to the knowledge of the brothers Rack and their French competitors, the Pinion freres and their ground breaking work in the field of vehicle steering.

Or, you get one of these;

If the Over-Limit stops on the starboard side of the steering Rack are engaged, what is maximum pressure allowed in the hydraulic fluid bypass orifice before the hydraulic pump reverts to the standby mode?

A.) 6
B.) 42
C.) Clockwise
D.) Up

And it all becomes worthwhile....

Anyhow, I passed the INRAT with a respectable score. I felt I got a fair mix of questions type one and two as above and my " knowing " of the answers before seeing the choices was pretty accurately matched by my final score. Sometimes with multiple choice exams, you know you were guessing on lets say, 25% of the questions, you had no real clue as the correct answer, yet you got an 85% mark.... I got 4 questions wrong in the end and two of them, I knew were wording issues that could have been interpreted two different ways ( and of course those answers were represented among the available choices.. ).

The other two, were part of a larger series of say a half dozen related questions, and I'm not sure which ones I got wrong. They don't tell you specific questions you got wrong, only give you a generic area of knowledge that you need to study on. Its so awesome when the back of the exam sheets says you need remedial study on " The Atmosphere. " or " Aerodynamics, Flight ".

Sigh.

Anyhow.... The other exam, was the IATRA. I think it used to stand for Intermediate aircraft Type Rating or something along those lines. Apparently it doesn't stand for anything anymore, but they kept the acronym as it was catchy. I concur.

I looked at the study guide for this one about the same time I started the course about five months ago and noted that it had a lot of similarities to the INRAT and those areas where it differed were actually very similar to the Flight Dispatcher exams I wrote a couple years ago. I planned on writing this one at some point, just not at the same time, or under the gun time-wise. I didn't look at the study guide again, to avoid getting distressed about being woefully unprepared, as I simply didn't have the time to study for it, so it was a moot point.

Even so, I scored fairly well on it at the end of the day. I did however notice a differential in the ratio of Questions-Known to Questions-Guessed and the multiple choice format gave me a few extra points for being able to successfully pick a letter out of four possible choices.

So, those hurdles are down, and they were weighing fairly heavily on me. Pooch either of those exams and I would be re-writing them on the day before I am scheduled to leave. Do the unthinkable and fail them a second time and I'd be kissing this job goodbye, as there would be a 30-day wait till a third try would be allowed.

Back in the Simulator today to brush up on a couple of things, the last sim session I will probably do. As my instructor pointed out to me, hopefully the last sim session that I have to pay for, hopefully, in my career. If there were any more for me in the future, they would/should be paid for by the employer.

I'm glad to be rid of that thing now too. In the beginning, I loved it for the savings versus trying to learn some of the IFR stuff in the aircraft with that insane meter spinning like crazy... But, I've had a hell of a time controlling the sim during the engine-failure-under-IFR portion. During these sessions, one of the simulated engines on the simulated multi-engine plane is failed during a flight where all reference is by instruments only ( ie in cloud ). In the real aircraft the nose yaws noticeably over to one side, but is controlled by the rudder and bank angle with pretty authoritative result. There is also all kinds of feedback in the controls and the aircraft itself to guide you through it as well.

In the sim, she simply pulls hard over and tries to roll over on her back. I get stuck trying to wrestle it back under some semblance of control and usually end up doing a poor job of the engine feather part because I know that feathering the prop probably wont change the outcome of the flight if its done while inverted.

This is a picture of a coal-fired power plant out in the prairies. I found it neat that it created its own little fog/cloud bank over the discharge pond/slough where the hot water is ejected after the steam turns the power turbine. If you look closely too, you can clearly see the the piles of coal where they get stockpiled and then hauled to the plant by truck.

More drama with the last push to get things wrapped up before the end of the month, but the list of Must-Have-Done things is shrinking quickly, while the list of hmm-that-might-be-a-good-idea continues to grow.

I have two more IFR Cross-country flights to do, booked in for next weekend. One of them has to be 100nm in length and the other is just a training flight to a couple local airports to do a few different types of approaches and sample some of the airspace around here.

One big shopping day has to get done at some point. I've been growing a list of stuff I need for the new neighbourhood, mostly decent outdoor clothing and a few household items for the summer abode.

I need to cancel my car insurance once i arrive up North, as my employer is giving me the use of a small truck for the summer.

I need to pack up my computer and make sure I have a wireless receiver installed so I have internet access while up there. The XBox will probably stay home for this trip as I don't have a decent enough TV to play it on anyways and there is no way I'm showing up at my new job with a TV in the back seat of my car.

I need to get our good car tuned-up, cleaned up and oil-changed before the end of the month so it can be passed over to TLW. It is overdue for both the tune-up and the oil change, hasn't been vacuumed in a shameful amount of time and has recently developed a little rattle in the exhaust system at certain RPM's. I suspect a hangar is busted and needs a little work before it develops into something worse.

I need to get all my tax paperwork in order and either take it with me to finish electronically up there, or find time to do it here. I have a small amount of self-employment income, expenses and training expenses for my foray into freelance ultralight-instructing last summer and now we have a Dependant to add into the mix of income tax excitement.

There's lots more stuff to get done, and more seems to get added to the list everyday...strangely though, the amount of time I have left to get it accomplished seems to keep shrinking...almost daily it seems!

I'm throwing in some pictures I took during my trip up North-ish back in February to my self-invited interview for the other job. Mostly because I have no relevant pictures to add and I feel bad about that.

This was kind of funny. We had a fairly high-end car parked in one of our hangars while it awaited sale at an auction. This is pretty common, only the proletariat park their cars in "garages", the true elite hangar their rides.

Anyhow, I was assisting a flight crew off their aircraft and over to their hotel with one of our vans and while we waited for the last crew member to finish up on the plane, some of the others expressed an interest in the car they could see through the widow, so I gave them the 50-cent tour. One of them actually showed me a neat feature of this Rolls-Royce SomeThingOrOther. When the driver opens one of the rear doors for his or her passenger, their is a little button on the inside of the door-jamb that you press. Presto! out pops an umbrella, stored neatly in the doorframe. Sweet.

They asked whose it was and I replied jokingly that it probably belonged to a (ex) drug dealer as it was currently up for auction sale. We then peeked in the trunk and it was completely empty, except for a small brick-sized packed wrapped up in duct-tape and bubble-wrap in the middle of the trunk floor. Looking like a brick of contraband like you might have seen on Miami Vice... If you are that old that you know what Miami Vice is. Or that young that you know what gets wrapped in duct tape and bubble wrap in the truck of a (ex)drug dealers Rolls.

Big things are afoot....

2011-05-07T23:44:00.000-07:00

Wow, a lot has happened over the last three weeks or so.

Pretty much every single " plan " that I had in store for this summer and ALL of my tenuous job leads or options, have changed or disappeared altogether.

TLW and I went out East to visit my mum and had a great time. I promise a post about this at some point in the future, but I'm a little short on free time at the moment... The Wee One had ZERO issues on the plane, in fact she passed out the moment the engines lit up on all four flights. Even the longest leg of almost 6 hours was no problem for her. Seatmates all around were pleased by this development, as were we.

Northern fueling / flying job disappeared into the fog of the employer simply never getting back to me...at some point I wrote it off, and of course the next day they email to tell me they are posting the job opening and for me not to worry, I was still in the running. Phone call about two weeks later tells me, sorry, you are now, in fact, out of the running.

Skydive pilot job out east that they seemed quite eager to have me fly for them, also disappears with the owner telling me he will call me when he is in town so we can have an interview face-to-face. His trip dates come, no call. I email to remind him we were going to get together before he leaves town...leave-town date comes and goes without a reply and I still haven't heard back. No phone number for him as the drop-zone is closed for the season and he is still on the road...

Kinda got me thinking about meat-bombing, so I obsess on it for a few weeks and apply to pretty much ever drop zone in the country. Got a few replies, but nothing that looked liked it had any legs.

I learn that amongst skydiving types, a " Whuffo " is a derogatory term for a non-skydiving person, whose stereotypical question is along the lines of " Whuffo you wan jump outta dat a'plane? "

Then TLW wakes me up one morning.

" There is a phone call for you, some guy from the Northwest Territories, wake up. "

A brief phone interview ensues. I got the company name at the start of the call, while I was still waking up, and by the time I realized what was going on, I had forgotten it. It was now too far into the call to ask for it without sounding half-asleep, stupid, or both. Luckily, they have a very unique aircraft type and I CSI'd them and their website after the call.

Two days later, there is an arranged conference call with the CP and the guy who originally called me. The job is offered, accepted and start date set.

June 1st I'm outta here!!

I am going to try and keep things as confidential as I can, at least for awhile. If you know, or figure out, who I am working for, please keep it to yourself.

I'm packing up the car and heading north ( over 2000 kms north ) at the end of this month and have definite plans to be there for the summer and am hoping it turns into more.

TLW and TWO, will be staying down here, until we know if this will be a permanent or seasonal position, which I most likely will not know till late summer. It was hard last time I went away, more for TLW then it was for me as I simply had too little time to feel sorry for myself or my situation. This time, she's the one with the distractions and the preoccupation, and I'm the one who will be challenged.

I am playing ostrich with this one and trying not to talk or think too much about how much I am going to miss my girls.

But things are moving forward again and we both are EXTREMELY excited by this turn of events. Who knows if it will turn out to be a good thing or not, at least things are happening.

So, watch this space... The next couple of weeks will be an insane rush of finishing off the IFR training and getting ride-ready so I can do a PPC ride to complete my IFR. I need to write both the INRAT and IATRA exams in 5 days. Both to get it out of the way and also to ensure I have a chance to re-write if it comes to that, as there is a 14-day waiting period between a failed exam and the next rewrite.

I've been studying for 4 months, so I am hoping for a positive result.

So, if you've suffered through the last year or so of banality, spotty posting schedules and pathetic whining, stick around, things are about to get fun again...

J is also for Just trying....

2011-04-05T22:37:00.000-07:00

Totally off-topic, but a blog that I follow posted a story about a Paramedic down in California who was attacked after a baseball game in LA. He was wearing the "wrong" jersey apparently and is now in intensive care in an LA hospital.

There is a million sad stories like this playing out around the world, every minute of every day, even as we speak. Think about your situation, sitting on your computer reading this....can you compare or even convincingly empathize with someone in the intensive care waiting room, waiting for news of your father and his senseless injury or death?

You can't solve the worlds problems, but you can't turn away from them all either.

To donate, or to hear the full story, please click below.

http://www.smco-ems.com/bryanstow.html

If you can't donate, I bet you can tell this story or pass the link to at least two people in the next 24 hours....

It could be as easy as posting two paragraphs on your blog or cut-and-pasting the above onto your facebook status...

J is for Job....

2011-04-03T15:59:00.000-07:00

( I know, shameless, but if TLW can play dress-up with her, why can't I ? )

Ok, I'll admit it, I am pretty much stumped for a ramp-related entry that would fall under the letter J.

A couple of other bloggers who I follow have both posted recently on the subject of jobs, or lack thereof, and since I am furiously job-hunting as well, I thought I could stretch it into something. Since the whole point of doing the A-Z thing was really nothing more than a way to kick myself in the ass and actually churn out an entry or two now and then, I figure it fits the spirit, if not the letter of the law.

I'm a big fan of following blogs. I feel a little bit like I'm watching some sort of reality-show, but the realest kind. There's little in the way of editing and it all happens in relative real-time. In following along with someone, you build an idea of the " character " with tidbits of information picked up in their entries over a couple of years. As well as glimpses into their personality that they probably didn't even intend to impart, but as the "viewer" you get to see, regardless if they meant for you to see it or not.

In a reality show, they'd edit out the bits that didn't fit the character they are trying to portray, you only see exactly what they want you to see. In a blog, the blogger probably tries to do the same, but given the nature of your average bloggers post-production editing skills, you probably get a lot more.

There is also the aspect of the interaction, in a blog, you can ask a question after the "episode", in the comments section. You'll usually get a response as well, adding a whole nother layer to the experience.

Its actually easy to forget that these are REAL people, leading real lives.

Another Happy Customer - this one bought a MASSIVE gift basket as a thank-you gift for the FBO crew. Some seriously high end chocolates and all manner of exotic treats. Very classy!

Anyhow.... Both Dagny and Aviatrix, two aviation-blogging-action-figures whose entire seasons I have followed over the last four years or so, have both lamented on their dogged, but unsuccessful-to-date job searches. I might as well join in...

To really and truly complete the illusion that this is somehow related to working at an airport, I'm going to stretch the J is for Jobs connection by commenting on the fact that there usually are a lot of pilots hidden in the mix of baggage handlers, tug operators and other airport workers.

At the FBO where I work, I've personally seen two guys go from bag smasher to Multi-Turbine FO's in a little less than four years. One of them flies on a KingAir 350 doing the medevac thing and the other is sitting in the right seat of a Citation XLS. Albeit, the Jet-guy ( Citation XLS ) had a few years of instructing time to add to his credentials... I suspect that the KingAir-guy has probably surpassed him now, as they fly the living snot out of that machine...

I came across another blog the other day as well, worth checking out. Back story appears to be; local BC boy gets pilots license, smashes bags in YYZ for awhile, moves to Newfoundland to work as a dispatcher, buys camera, starts blog. Funnily enough, as the blog is not on blogger, I can't follow it with my usual methods, and it had me linking to my facebook page if I wanted to "follow". I did that, I like to get new entries from blogs I follow as-they-are-posted instead of catching up on them en masse, or worse, forgetting all about them.. Then I noticed on the facebook link that he is friends with two people I know from the airport out here...both pilots and ex bag-smashers as well.... haha.

Anyhow, when you finish flight school and you have little else to offer an employer than your meagre Transport Canada Minimum required hours, pretty much ANYTHING to do with an airport environment or an aircraft could be considered an additional skill. I'm kind of getting to the point though that I feel like I'm spending a little too-much time hanging out at the airport again and not getting on with getting on. I suppose you can chalk that up to basically taking a year-off to hatch our new family addition, but it starts to feel a little depressing watching people who were a year ahead of you at one point in a career progression be three years ahead of you now...

So, Plan A was to find gainful aviation employment for this summer. Originally, we were going to limit my searches to permanent, year-round, worth-moving-for opportunities. Didn't matter where and would most likely be somewhere of less than desirable locale... This plan sort-of hinged on my completing the MIFR well before spring. That isn't going to happen now. In fact, I would count myself lucky to have a Multi-Engine rating before I get my first sun-burn this year, at the rate things are going.

Between my schedule with work, The Wee One and The Lovely Wife's study schedules it was already going to be a stretch. Throw in an aircraft that has been down for maintenance for over a month now, and a solid month of absolute crap weather before that...well, you get the idea.

I've beat the hell out of the simulator in that time, skipping ahead to the IFR portion of the course while we waited for the Multi-Engine Aeroplane to rejoin the living. Good use of the time I suppose, but in light of some of the prospects for this summer, it might be a bit of a waste of time at this point.

Anyhow, Plan A started to look iffy at best, so we decided to open up the possibility of ANYTHING. Another season away working a seasonal position, a ground job that had prospects, ANYTHING.

So, I've been dutifully sending out emails and cover letters to all the contacts in my prospects list. Over the last two years, I've maintained the list, adding actual peoples names as they've replied and told me to PFO ( Please F%^&^ Off ) and a shorter list of people who have replied with even a hint of interest in my resume in the past.

Oh - side note. I looked up PFO to see if there was an actual abbreviation that had been bastardized or if it really existed in it's commonly understood form.

Turns out, PFO does actually mean Please F&*k Off and is common use, apparently even in some HR departments.

One other notable use of the acronym PFO was in British Emergency rooms, usedto classify a type of injury common on weekend evenings... Pissed, Fell Over. I'm not even making this up.

So anyhow, not too much in the way of results on the job front, but here's where I am;

Plan A.2

Ground job in a Northern Place. Company owns at least a half dozen aircraft and phone-interviewed me last year( I didn't get it last year ). I stayed in touch with a couple emails over the winter and a self-invited visit/interview to their facility in February. They've advertised the position, but emailed me before-hand to let me know I am still in the running, but they have to advertise the spot before they hold formal interviews and/or hire someone. I hold my chances at this one to be a little better than 50/50. I suspect I would be worth a lot more to them in the long-run with a MIFR and my lack thereof for this spring might hurt my chances. I do however have experience with the ground position duties and am qualified for their entry-level aircraft. In theory, as long as I got a MIFR in the first two years of working for them, I wouldn't ever be under-qualified for internal movement, assuming normal progression. If FO Freddie runs off to Air Canada without notice, and I'm the only one around but lacking a MIFR...well, it would be like having your headphones on and not hearing the " Does anyone on board have a pilots license? " call on the P.A....

Plan B.1

I emailed the owner of a sky-diving outfit ( known as a Drop-Zone, or DZ ) in a far-flung corner of the country. The owner would like to have a sit-down interview in late April when he passes through where I am now. Basically, if I was to live near the DZ, it sounds like there would be a fair bit of work for me. It looks like a lot of fun, and I didn't see any pictures of moose carcasses on their website. I would however, have to relocate to said far-flung corner and the financial considerations of trying to subsist on what would essentially be a part-time job are not exactly adding up. It wouldn't take much to make up the difference though, so I'm not giving up on this just yet, perhaps I can do some freelance moose-carcass transporting at night, who knows.

Plan C.1

I sent a bazillion resumes out to owners and chief pilots of flying services associated with fishing lodge and outpost operations. My reply-rate when I had a total of Zero experience in this market segment was about 6 replies to 200 resumes. Those 6 replies included those who took the time to tell me to not bother them with my useless resume. This time, with the possibility of another season away from home, doubly difficult now to even consider with a certain soon-to-be-walking-and-talking individual in our little household, my 200 resumes got me about two dozen replies. A solid half dozen of those expressed sincere interest, but no offers of a job. I knew float-season hiring had already come and gone, but at that time, going away was off the table.

The sincere replies mostly consisted of " we have our pilots hired for this year, but, as always, someone inevitably flakes out once the season is underway and you are top of the list to get a call if/when they do ".

Plan D.1

Keep plugging away at the MIFR and accept the fact that I might not get any flying work this summer. I make pretty good money at my present job and I do get to work near airplanes. Another year of equity in the condo ( which is getting smaller by the day, due to you-know-who's newfound mobility ), another year of family close-by while our little girl is still little. And of course, another year behind....

It might even work out well to not complete the IFR part right away, most of the simulator stuff we do at the flight school for 150 bucks an hour can be practised at home on my computer for roughly , oh, nothing per hour, and done ad nauseum. It sure would be nice to go into a flight test actually feeling comfortable with the material..

Plan E.1

Screw it. I'm going fishing.

I is for International Garbage

2011-03-22T10:27:00.001-07:00

Yeah, thats pretty much all I can come up with for I...its a little bit of a stretch as all I could think of was " International ". Theres lots of Intl things going on out at the airport, but most people are aware of most of them. International Flights, International Customs, International Arrivals, yada yada yda.

But there is actually such a thing as International Garbage.

See, when a flight arrives, everything on that flight that isn't part of the aircraft ( and will be subsequently leaving ) needs to clear customs.

The passengers get cleared, the crew gets cleared, even the aircraft itself gets cleared. Sometimes the booze and duty-free items on board the aircraft are even sealed by customs as a sort of " bonded cargo " where they have entered the country, but someone has promised that they will not be sold or consumed while visiting and will in fact leave again.

But there is an interesting grey area with the trash. The trash will indeed be staying, so it needs to be cleared right? I mean, you are importing all manner of stuff, including fresh fruit and vegetables which are a big non-no in many countries. They could be infested with foreigner-bugs after all! Just try bringing an orange through customs sometime and see how seriously they take it.

But your orange is nice and clean.

And it's not covered with a babies diaper, a pile of coffee grounds and a used sick-sac. The orange in the garbage is, so customs, while taking it seriously, don't actually want anything to do with it. So, between them and the airlines, they invented a procedure for dealing with International Garbage that looked good on paper and would convince any lawyers reading through the procedures manuals that all was being done tickety-boo.

The procedure, as I understand it, is to paint some of your dumpsters a different colour.

Ok, there's more to it than that, but its all on paper..the reality of it is....some of the dumpsters are painted a different colour.

Thats it.

They'd have you believe much more was being done, but to be blunt, no.

Some operations don't even have access to this special colour of paint and the garbage gets thrown in a regular green one.

Anyways, thats the story there. If you ever get the chance to take one of those college or trade school Airport Management courses and they start in on the International Garbage, just sit in the back row and snicker, you know the truth.

Its kind of sad sometimes to see what gets thrown in the trash after some flights. I mean, stocking the galley on a large charter airliner has its challenges. I'd compare it to stocking an RV for a long road trip. At home, you have all kinds of extra's that you dont think about, like ketchup or salt and pepper or forks. To set up for a charter, you have to bring EVERYTHING. A lot of the larger airliners that charter out tend to sit awhile between trips as well, so you can't just leave the fridge stocked, it all has to go at the end of the trip.

Enter the Lineman, who will helpfully take away this stuff ( and avoid it becoming Intl Garbage ) and see that it gets recycled ( yum! ). Or, follow your Ops Manual which spells out how International Garbage must be segregated and disposed of properly. sigh.

I remember one Global Express that came into town one night for a maintenance stop. It was actually at the end of a series of trips that had it pretty much continuously on the move for its corporate owners, shuttling around execs for a little over three months. The thing had literally been around the world a few times over, in each direction. As a result, the galley had slowly been stocked to the hilt with all the little accoutrements of a good kitchen. Spices, sauces and salad dressings from around the world. They handed us about a half dozen packed boxes full of all kinds of interesting stuff. ( Which we of course threw in the appropriate coloured dumpster...not )

Oh, and not Aviation or Ramp related, but a true story. This happened to TLW and I last year and I stumbled on this email summarizing the event for our strata council.

I is for Intruder

To whom it may concern,

On the morning of July XXth, 2010 a person claiming to be a XXXXX resident entered our unit, without our permission and refused to leave until the police were called and they were removed from our suite.

My wife and I were sleeping at approximately 0700 and were both awakened by a loud banging outside our patio door. It sounded like someone had hit our patio balcony glass several times with their hand. I got up and saw out the window a person standing on the walkway outside our ground-floor unit, with their back to the glass, partially obscured by the stone wall.

I went out on the patio to find out the reason for the disturbance at this hour and saw that it was a man in his late 20's or early 30's holding a small boy, perhaps 4 or 5 years old. I also noticed another resident across the street walking his dog, and he had made a comment to the gentleman with the child that " people are still sleeping you know ", most likely in response to having seen him banging on the glass.

I asked the man what the problem was and he said " theres something going on, you have to call the cops, theres someone in my apartment, you have to call the cops ". He appeared quite agitated and scared, along with his child. My first impression was that he was under the influence of drugs as he appeared quite nervous, sweaty and unable to stand still. I told him I would call the cops and went back inside my suite to get the phone.

As I picked up the phone, my wife, watching out the patio door yelled " He's throwing his baby over the deck! He's coming in! "

The man entered our suite with his child, through our patio door and went into our dining area and crouched down on the floor with his child. He instructed me to lock the door and call the cops. I told him at this point to leave our suite and that I was already calling the cops. He said he needed to stay here and to keep the doors locked, and that he did not want to leave.

He also told me at that point, that he was a resident of building XX, suite # XX. I spoke with the 911 dispatcher and passed that information to them as well.

While we waited for the police to arrive, my wife called our neighbour, XXXX, a member of strata council, and asked that he come over to make sure this was in fact a resident as well as to have additional assistance.

XXXX arrived and confirmed the man as a resident of XXXX and waited with us until the police arrived, approximately 10 minutes after the inital call. The entire time the man remained in our dining area, crouched on the floor with his child. He made several phone calls on our phone, at least one of which was to his father or father-in-law. As he had put his father on speaker-phone when he dialed, I heard his father ask him " what kind of trouble have you got yourself into this time ? ".

The police arrived and I let them into the building by passing them our fob over the patio railing. As soon as they entered our suite they called the man by his first name " XX ". He seemed surprised that they knew who he was, but one of the police made a comment that " oh, we know who you are, XX ". He was put into handcuffs and removed from our suite.

At this time the police took my name and details, but on my asking them if they needed a statement from me, they declined.

We will be following up with the XXX Police Service to ensure that charges of unlawful entry, trespassing, mischief, and/or break and enter have been laid against this individual. If charges have not been laid, an official complaint will be lodged with the Police Ombudsman.

I strongly urge strata to look into the status of the occupant(s) of Suite XXX in building XX and if in fact this person is a rental tenant, that steps be taken to evict this tenant.

On listening further to the police discussing the situation with the father outside our window as he was taking custody of the child, we heard that this family has had extensive problems with drugs and alchohol. The police also noted on entering the suite, that there was broken glass and evidence of some kind of altercation.

Domestic Garbage, that one.

Oh, no charges were laid against him. On following up with the cops, I was told by the investigating officer that he is a known crack-head and that he was having a paranoid episode, and " thats just the way it is when they on crack. ".

I further followed up with the Watch Commander to file a complaint or push to get a little more than a shrug of the shoulders, but no dice. He echoed the same sentiment.

There was a little more to it as well, as the officers responding in our suite actually thought that the boy was ours. While they were cuffing this guy, instructed my wife to go around behind this douchebag and get the kid. In hindsight, putting my 8 month pregnant wife in between a man and his child while he is being handcuffed inside an apartment he forced his way into while high on crack probably wasn't in her best interest. Especially since the cop had at least three of his buddies standing behind him with their thumbs in their belts that could have / should have, done that particular task.

Anyways, sorry for the lack of pictures with this post and lately in general...I haven't brought my camera to work for a while and have regretted it more than a few times.

H is for Heavy Pad

2011-03-05T22:51:00.000-08:00

At our FBO we have two parking areas for large aircraft. These are areas of the ramp where the surface is made of reinforced Concrete instead of asphalt. The concrete can support much heavier loads than the asphalt and is thus the place where we park the big jets.

We have a little procedure we use for parking them that we like to call " spinning " them.

I tried to type up a description, but failed. Instead, behold my outside limits of my artistic abilities.

The red line represents the path you want the aircraft to take as you marshal it into position.

So, first off, the aircaft has to be kept close to the side of the ramp as they taxi in. as most of our larger aircraft arrive at night, some crews will be a little nervous about taxiing this close to the edge of the pavement. Crews that have been here before recognize the awesomeness that is our marshalling crew and will usually take direction well. Others, just don't.

Secondly, the path once the aircraft is on the pad and you are getting ready to " spin " them, needs to take a small 45 degree turn to it's right. This can be difficult to convey with marshalling wands. Technically, there is marshalling-ology for this and the degree of turn is sometimes indicated by the arm you are using to show the direction of turn being at a 90 degree angle to your body ( normal turn ) a higher angle, towards the ground, of say 120 degrees ( sharper turn ) or pointing sharply downwards, say 160 degrees, representing a hard turn.

If you are facing the aircraft and want it to turn to it's right, you indicate the direction of turn with an outstretched Left arm and wave the Right arm from an outstretched position, towards your head.

I've also seen it where the speed of the moving arm represents the sharpness of the turn.

As both are kind of obscure and usually not in most of the " official " marshalling guides, the second method usually works best as an increase in the speed of your signal is a little more obvious in my opinion.

In any case, the little 45 degree turn allows the Main Landing Gear to move up the pad, so that when you finally make the larger turn, the wing will be centred over the pad, instead of hanging over the grass. This way, we can get ground vehicles past that side of the aircraft and we don't have under-wing slung engines running over grass and ingesting lawn clippings.

The problem is that most crews who are first-time to our ramp, once they realize we are taxiing them towards the edge of the ramp to facilitate turning them around 180 degrees or so, figure that once you start them turning, they should power up and crank it over, all the way over.

A large aircraft requires a good deal of momentum, power or sometimes both, to make a sharp turn like that. Considering they are coming in slowly ( scared of taxiing off the edge of the ramp, in the dark and uncertain of the marshallers ) once they realize our intent-to-spin, as soon as you indicate any turn, they will usually pour the coals to her and crank the nosewheel over.

It can be a challenge to get the gentle turn in first.

Technically the 45 degree turn is followed by another little straight-ahead segment as well. If they've already powered up and cranked it over, when you suddenly switch from a turning indication to a straight-ahead one, there can be some hesitation to comply. In probably 20% of the cases, they simply decide you are an idiot and continue the turn.

Thats on their first visit. We'll take the time to explain what we are doing and we usually get a little more trust the next visit.

It has to be hard for some of the flight crews though. I've seen some linecrew ( thankfully not at our FBO ) who I wouldn't trust to marshal a golf cart around a football field, let alone a 100 million dollar jet around a small ramp, in the dark, full of millionaire passengers.

H is also for Hold Entries

Not much in the way of hold entries on the ramp, but there sure are a lot in my simulator sessions at the flight school lately.

A hold is a way for Air Traffic Control ( ATC ) to park you in the sky. This might be for traffic spacing, a closed airport, runway or other problem. It can also be used by the pilot to park themself in the sky for a bit. Perhaps to change plans, figure out an aircraft issue or anything else where you'd rather stay in one place instead of blundering off in one direction and then have to turn around and come all way back depending on the new plan.

So, a hold is a maneuver that will ensure an aircraft will stay within a prescribed area assigned to it by ATC ( the Protected Airspace ). A hold is also defined by a navigation "fix". A fix being a spot that can be defined by the navigation instruments in the cockpit. Usually a radio-based navigation aid, but can also be a GPS coordinate.

Depending on the direction that you are approaching the fix, there are three different maneuvers that you are recommended to use when entering the hold.

For those people who know what a hold is, I won't make you scratch your eyes out listening to me explain hold entries.

For those that don't know what a hold is, I won't make you scratch your eyes out listening to me explain hold entries.

Suffice to say there is a little bit of mental math and a whole lot of visualization to do it properly.

G is for Gear Pins

2011-02-27T22:50:00.000-08:00

So, I've been working hard at my Multi Engine / IFR Rating.

The Lovely Wife has been working hard at a Medical Terminology course thats a pre-requisite for another course that starts in April.

I've been working my day job, TLW has been a full-time mommy for some time now and we've both been juggling study breaks, personal time and of course, night-shift with The Wee One.

It has gotten to the point where we have an online calendar that we both consult before doing anything, replete with respective study periods, class or lesson times, personal time blocks, family commitments, my work schedule and of course, a small portion of the day where we are expected to sleep...

Hectic, to say the least.

Unfortunately, blogging has taken a back seat to pretty much everything else. The only reason I'm typing this, is I should be practicing hold entries on flight sim and planning a mock IFR cross-country flight and my brain has surrendered. It was either this or play some mindless flash game on facebook.

I just saw The Social Network and have decided I need to stop giving those losers my money and/or contributing to their page-load counts.

In any case, heres an update on the last month or so and some of our happenings, aviation and otherwise.

The Wee One

TWO has had a few milestones lately. They seem to come so fast. Everything she does is usually a first of some sort or other and physiologically speaking, big things are afoot.

She just hit six months and we are easing her into "solids". I use that term loosely, and frankly, so do her bowels. A little Rice Cereal mixed with a bit of mushed-up fruit. A new fruit every three days or so, so we can spot any allergies or other issues. So far, Bananas and Strawberries, all systems nominal.

For the last couple weeks she has made the leap from rolling over onto her tummy and back by herself, to getting up on her hands and knees and rocking back and forth in a threatening manner. The threat of course, is that we will go to the kitchen to prepare her mush and come back to find she has walked into the den and started blogging.

A couple little white pointy daggers have popped out of her gums. Two on the bottom and one up top. Came as a bit of a surprise as there was little fanfare or histrionics with their arrival. A little extra drool and some funny sleep patterns of late, but thats it.

Not that the teeth will assist in any way with her current eating routine of gumming the spoon and rubbing mush into her hair and hands.

Multi-IFR Training

Ack, where to begin. This one is by far the most cerebral part of my flight training so far. An innate set of "Good Hands and Feet" ( which I am not professing to have ) will not save me on this one. Lots to learn and memorize.

I'm currently training on a Seneca II. A Twin-engine, turbocharged, non-pressurized, 7-seat aeroplane.

Quite a nice plane actually and it seems to have power to spare compared with some trainers I had a chance to look at while shopping around. 200 Horsepower a side to be precise, and with the turbochargers, all of that is available, right up to 12,000 feet before she starts gasping for air.

Avionics are very nice as well. Seems the AI and/or DG packed it in a while back on this plane and in the research of the Re and Re, they discovered that installing a partial glass cockpit, in the form of an Aspen HSI system, was cheaper, or at least a relatively inexpensive way to upgrade.

The AI is(was) the Attitude Indicator, the little blue and brown ball shaped instrument that you would use to reference the horizon when it's not visible out the front window. The instrument has a gyroscope inside it, run(usually) by a vacuum system and is a key component in the Instrument-flying instrument set. The DG is the Directional Gyro. Similarly run by vacuum and a gyro, it gives you a compass direction on a stable platform.

That is, more stable than a little piece of paper mounted on a pin and floating in a glass jar full of kerosene and bouncing around in an aeroplane and trying to give you indications of magnetic directions while being packaged inside a metal aircraft and sitting on top of all the radio equipment, electrics and spinning gyro bits....

So anyway, the Aspen system is pretty sweet. It's a "partial glass cockpit" in that a couple of key analog and/or mechanical instruments have been replaced by a small computer display screen that gives you the same info, and more, from a solid-state system.

And wow, does it ever give you more.

In some ways, its frustrating, as I'm trying to learn Instrument flying procedures and regulations, handling a larger aircraft and its extra complement of systems, learning the flight test guide and preparing for the written, but then you throw in a modern GPS system and whole slew of extra little "oh, let me show you this, this is cool, watch what it will do " bits and I find my brain tuning out the nice-to-know stuff in sheer survival mode, for favor of the you-better-damn-well-know-this stuff.

The aircraft has had some mechanical issues of late, but luckily, we are forging ahead with the IFR part of the training, so on a day when I miss out on the Multi-Engine part of the course, due to weather or other issues, we can head over to the Simulator Shack where I can sweat it out for an hour trying to learn and practice some of the stuff I have been dutifully studying for months now.

At Six Bucks a minute in the real airplane( a beer a minute ), I'm more than happy to sit in the sim at a fraction of that and practice it till I've got it semi-down.

Day Job

Work out at the airfield has been busy lately. Mostly busy as we've lost some staff over the last year that haven't been replaced due to the economy. As our company US-Owned, they are feeling the pinch a lot more down there and it is having a trickle down effect onto management up here. As always, the monkey at the top of the tree looks down and sees the smiling faces of all the little worker-monkeys making their way up. The monkey at the bottom looks up and sees nothing but @$$holes.

The fuel distributor that we sell for, has also switched over to a new metering system in our trucks. Our old system was so old it was barely computerized. It had these giant " RAM Cards " that were the size and shape of eight-track cassettes and held the days pumping data on it for download at the end of the day.

I'm sure they held upwards of a kilobyte or two of data on each one. Heady stuff for 1972, not so much today...

Now we have a new system, and it's much maligned, as all new systems are. I could rant all day about it, but I'd probably get in trouble and frankly, you always end up coming across as some progress-reluctant Luddite when ranting about the perceived shortcomings in technological change.

I've done a little work with database systems and crude programming in the past though and even to my untrained eye, I can spot the work of a hack when I see it, that's all I'm going to say.

Job Hunt

Some exciting prospects here...

a company I interviewed with over the phone last year is looking like a good potential prospect for this year. I kept in touch with a couple updated resumes over the winter and I actually just got back from making the trip out to see them and introduce myself and get the tour of their operation. It wasn't technically an "interview", but it was close and I suspect something might materialize on this front. Would mean a move to another province and another adventure. Lots to consider and lots of stuff I shouldn't be talking about until things fall more into place....watch this space...

Aside from that, with the addition of the MIFR rating to my license, it will pretty much be " complete ". That is, there is little more I can add to my license in the way of training and ratings that will help me get a job. Now, all I need to get a job is some experience. But of course to get that, I will need to get a job.....funny how that works...

I saw they are looking for more ultralight instructors down at the grass strip where I worked last summer. I'd love to do it again, but frankly, with The Wee One, I really need to find a full-time flying job...trying to fly part-time, work full time and parent full-time, just doesn't add up. Either that or find a cure for sleeping.

Iphone

TLW and I recently traded in our circa 1986 "contractors model" cell phones for a pair of nifty little Iphones.

Wow.

Now I see what they mean when they say smartphones. These really are little PDA's, with very functional Internet browsing, email, GPS and all kinds of other functionality. Our little calendar I mentioned earlier is based on a google calendar, but is synced up to both our phones. If either of us makes and entry on the calendars on our phones, it automatically updates the main one online and the other phone as well.

Some of the Apps available for this thing are pretty sweet too. Lots of little games and novelty ones, but lots of really useful stuff as well.

Highly recommend.

( but of course, everyone else in the world knew this four years ago, and I'm just now catching up )

Road Trip

As part of my trip out to A Different Province, I got to briefly visit some places from my youth.

My old elementary school, complete with separate Boys and Girls entrances.

My old house.

The little alleyway off on the right is actually a steep little gravel road that receives No Winter Maintenance from the snow plow. But every year, some yahoo tries to do a hill-climb in their car or truck. Our kitchen window looked out onto this alley and I'd often get to see the offender come level to the window as I did the dishes and slow to a tire-spinning crawl right in front of me... Then I got to watch their cocky grins morph into white knuckle terror as they started, slowly at first but quickly gaining speed, sliding backwards down the hill.

I remember coming home from school one day and finding a giant car-shaped hole in our wall from where one of these losers had slid into it and then slunk away.

Luckily, the house is ( was?) owned and rented out by the city. Ownership being retained by the highways department in consideration of future expansion. At least that was the story twenty years ago when I lived there..

Random Pics;

Some shots of a very interesting visitor to the field recently, a British Military ( RAF ) Vickers VC-10.

This thing has Four engines, mounted two-a-side on the tail. Very unique design and a rare catch indeed for this neck of the woods.

I was poking around a 767 the other day and was looking at the nose gear and thought I'd comment on this.

On most large aircraft, and some smaller corporate jets as well, there is bit of linkage on the nose gear that connects the steering mechanism in the plane, be they cables, hydraulic assist cylinders or otherwise, to the nose wheel assembly. When you are towing some of these aircraft, you need to "disconnect" the steering mechanism otherwise you could damage parts of it when you turn the nose wheel manually with your tug or tow bar.

On some of the larger airliners, because the assemblies are far too heavy to be simply hooked together with a little pin, they have a "bypass" pin that you insert into the appropriate orifice and you have free rein to steer away.

As Linecrew, when towing an aircraft with disconnect-able gear, you had bloody well remember to disconnect before towing and reconnect afterwards. Like all things aviation, it ultimately falls to the pilot to ensure it is in place before he (tries to ) taxi away for take off. But, just because the ultimate liability rests with him, doesn't mean your fair share of vitriol isn't coming down the pipe if you fail to do your job....

Sweet, I've been struggling to come up with something for this posts " G is for..." item and I just stumbled on it!

G is for Gear Pins

A lot of larger aircraft will also have Gear Pins that need to be inserted before the aircraft can be moved around on the ground. The purpose of a Gear Pin is to stop the gear from retracting inadvertently while being towed. Usually its just a little pin say the thickness of a finger, that is inserted into the gear retraction assembly that would physically stop it from retracting.

As Linecrew, part of the service you can offer is to put the pins in place while the pilots are dealing with passengers or putting the aircraft to bed. Particularly where the main gear require a little bit of a stoop or kneel on the dirty ramp to put the pin in place. White pilot shirts and slacks generally do not stand up to this too well. As a good linecrew, you know where the pins are stored on the aircraft ( little cubbyhole on the stairs or in a cabinet inside ) and have them in even before the crew notices. Again, still their responsibility to ensure they're actually in...

I thought this was kind of neat too. On the nose gear, there is a panel for the ground crew to operate some functions on the aircraft, from outside. One of those functions is to shut off the APU ( Auxiliary Power Unit ), and on this one, you can actually discharge the fire extinguisher bottle into the APU if it catches fire. I've seen this on some Airbus aircraft as well, actually on the fuelers panel. Which is kind of handy as in a lot of cases when you are fueling an aircraft, the crew is upstairs with the APU running and you're the only one down stairs. If a fuel-related emergency were to occur, you might not be free to run upstairs and tell them to shut off the APU ( or to evacuate, for that matter ). Shutting it down on them though would certainly get their attention.

F is for Filming

2011-01-08T17:18:00.000-08:00

Occasionally the FBO where I work is used as a movie set. This week it was some US television series I had never heard of, but based on the amount of equipment they brought, it is obviously a big deal.

My favourite piece of kit they bring is the catering truck.

The Lovely Wife introduced me years ago to the Catering Caper and I've enjoyed it ever since. The fact is most movie shoots are comprised of many different contractors, all brought together to do their little part of the big picture. One of these contractors is the Caterer. The Caterer is simply tasked with feeding everyone on set, ie all the different contractors, actors, etc. The beauty is, they have no idea who is who and if you are packing a walkie-talkie, a clipboard and/or a reflective vest and make your way to the food area, chances are, you're getting fed.

The food was good.

( PS - I think I blogged about this before, but can't remember and am too lazy to look. Sometimes I find I have done this and can't help but think I am gravitating towards being THAT guy.. the one who has run out of interesting stories and starts repeating himself.... )

F is for Fire

Not something you'll find airside..hopefully... but definitely something we have to prepare for and take measures against. We used to wear Fire Retardant uniforms but sometime last year they decided that wasn't necessary anymore. Not sure what the justification was or if it as a simple cost/risk analysis, but there it is. We take Fire Extinguisher training every year and have no less than three extinguishers on each truck, one in the cab and two big ones on the back of the truck as well. We've also got a big 200 Pounder on wheels in front of the building in case of an aircraft fire. It kind of looks funny as it has great big wagon-wheel style wheels on it..

Most of the staff is of a similar mindset when it comes to this bad boy. That is, if there is ever a fire big enough that it is needed, chances are, we will have long since run away anyhow. I suppose if there were people trapped in a plane or something, it would change things somewhat.

A few years ago, the Avgas truck at one of our competitors had a mechanical malfunction while it was idling on their ramp and ended up catching fire. The fire started in the cab and they tried to fight it with hand-held extinguishers while it was small enough, but eventually, they ran away as well.

I'm told it took over 30 minutes for the local ARFF trrucks to show up, which, frankly, I have a hard time believing. But I'm curious if they would have run away as well. I wouldn't go anywhere near a burning Avgas truck. No way, No how. Turns out, the truck burned to the ground, with the tank and its flammable contents intact.

Luckily, 99% of our fuel sales are Jet Fuel. Jet fuel is very similar to Diesel and is very difficult to ignite. Similar to gasoline, the fluid form of jet fuel is actually not "flammable". You can throw lit matches into a puddle of jet fuel all day and not worry about it. Both gasoline and jet fuel need to be in vapour form in order to be lit by an open flame. In a liquid form, there simply isn't a combustible mixture, lots of fuel, a source of heat, but not enough oxygen to make it work. The mixture is simply too "rich". Add some heat, say from hot tarmac or a hot engine part and the fuel will start evaporating, turning into a vapour and mixing with the air.

Now we're getting somewhere.

Now we have a mixture that WILL ignite with an open flame. Gasoline will evaporate and create flammable vapours at practically room temperature. Jet fuel, needs to be much, much hotter to create a mixture that will burn. The temperature at which a fuel will create flammable evaporative vapours is known as its flashpoint. A puddle of gasoline on a hot ramp, will have a layer of highly flammable vapours coming off it, that you can even see on a hot day. Jet fuel won't.

Further to Jet fuel being relatively stable, a very large percentage of our deliveries into-plane are done in a closed system. The single-point nozzles are designed to deliver fuel without exposing it to the air ( or the fueler ) and any opportunity for unintentional evaporation.

F is for Frustration

Started working on my Multi-IFR over two months ago and at this rate, 2013 is looking pretty good for completion. Unless it happens to rain next winter...at all. I can only dedicate my two weekend days to flying and my instructor has my other day off, monday, as his fixed day off as well. The plane was down for mechanical repairs for almost three weeks in December and my instructor has also taken a three week vacation over the holidays. I'm starting to think that the goal of getting the entire MIFR done on a part-time basis between now and April might not be realistic. I'm already starting to consider only finishing the multi portion and maybe looking for another seasonal job for the summer.

Between TLW's mat leave and renting out our place for the summer, we could probably swing a summer away if I could find something worth going for. Accommodations are probably going to be the single largest deciding factor though. I'd also have to get approval for another leave of absence from my current employer as we'd be back in the fall.

It would be a lot nicer to finish the MIFR and actually be able to move somewhere semi-permanently, even if it meant working on the ground for a little while longer.

So yeah, frustrating.

F is for Freighter, Foreign

This occurred a few months ago, but I don't think I ever got around to posting the pics or details. One of our local Helicopter outfits was shipping a couple of Super Puma helicopters over to Afghanistan, and they chartered an Antonov 124 freighter to come in and pick them up.

The helicopters were staged on our ramp for a couple days while they worked on getting them ready for shipping. Mostly this involved taking the blades off and crating them up, not sure what else they did as both birds looked pretty ready-to-go once they got their blades back.

We were tasked with baby-sitting the workers as they came and went from the disassembly area as most of them did not have airside access passes and needed to be escorted to and fro with Block Passes. The local airport authority sent out three little security cars as well to set up a little perimeter around the work are and make sure no one wandered off down the taxiway.

The security guys come out for the movie shoots as well, and essentially they take a chunk of airside ramp and turn it into a non-restricted area so that all the (well fed ) workers can come and go without too much trouble.

I also got called in for an extra shift on the weekend that the AN-124 came in to help tow the helicopters over to the other side of the field where the freighter would be parking and be there to help the crew if they needed our services.

Our ramp isn't quite big enough to handle an AN124, so we used the Air Canada ramp instead.

Day of, and the freight forwarder ( Panalpina ) sent out their Heli-Logistics guy to come and oversee the whole deal. I've done a few project jobs like this and it is usually fun. If everything is well organized and planned out in advance, the forwarder is just a third wheel, but the minute something goes wrong, guess who everyone turns to, looking for Plan B?

Me and the other guy who were going to do the tow decided we'd have one guy on the tug and another taking up lead in one of the vans. The vans have much better radios ( and you don't have to compete with the tugs engine to hear them ) and we had quite a few people who wanted to ride-along.

The other guy has done a lot more towing than me, and doesn't like talking to Ground Control, so he took the tug and I took lead in the Van. Most of the towing I do is with the Lektro, a special vehicle designed for towing aircraft by lifting the nosewheel off the ground. Frankly, its kind of cheating it's so easy. You can still get in trouble if you don't know what you're doing, but the fact that you steer through the aircrafts nosewheel instead of through a pintle hook and two points of attachment a la a tow bar, makes it laughably easier than towing with a tow bar. As these helicopters have a very low front end, we can't "scoop" them with the Lektro, so its tow-bar time..luckily not for me.

My usual towing jobs involve vey short distances on the field, mostly one or two taxiways at most and rarely across any active runways. This time I made sure I had a pen and paper ready for my taxi clearance from ground.

Helicopter Tow plus one, cleared Alpha, Foxtrot, Charlie, Hold short runway 26 left.

Cross runay 26 Left, Delta-five, Delta to the ramp.

We got the helicopters in place and waited for the Antonov, wasn't hard to miss it on approach, the black smear of exhaust behind it was pretty obvious.

As it taxied in, we all noticed that the ground handling company that had been arranged was not there... They were supposed to be there with marshallers and a ground power unit. Just as I took the spare wands out of the van and prepared to marshal him in myself, one guy in a pickup showed up. The arrival schedule had changed at least three times over the past week and I guess no one had notified them. I was kind of disappointed as it would have been my first time marshalling one of these, but glad at the same time as it was pretty tight.

2010-12-24T23:52:00.000-08:00

Not mine, but seasonally appropriate.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Twas the night before Christmas, and out on the ramp,
Not an airplane was stirring, not even a Champ.

The aircraft were fastened to tiedowns with care,
In hopes that come morning, they all would be there.

The fuel trucks were nestled, all snug in their spots,
With gusts from two-forty at 39 knots.

I slumped at the fuel desk, now finally caught up,
And settled down comfortably, resting my butt.

When the radio lit up with noise and with chatter,
I turned up the scanner to see what was the matter.

A voice clearly heard over static and snow,
Called for clearance to land at the airport below.

He barked his transmission so lively and quick,
I'd have sworn that the call sign he used was "St. Nick".

I ran to the panel to turn up the lights,
The better to welcome this magical flight.

He called his position, no room for denial,
"St. Nicholas One, turnin' left onto final."

And what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a Rutan-built sleigh, with eight Rotax Reindeer!

With vectors to final, down the glideslope he came,
As he passed all fixes, he called them by name:

"Now Ringo! Now Tolga! Now Trini and Bacun!
On Comet! On Cupid!" What pills was he takin'?

While controllers were sittin', and scratchin' their head,
They phoned to my office, and I heard it with dread,
The message they left was both urgent and dour:

"When Santa pulls in, have him please call the tower."

He landed like silk, with the sled runners sparking,
Then I heard "Left at Charlie," and "Taxi to parking."

He slowed to a taxi, turned off of three-oh
And stopped on the ramp with a "Ho, ho-ho-ho..."

He stepped out of the sleigh, but before he could talk,
I ran out to meet him with my best set of chocks.

His red helmet and goggles were covered with frost
And his beard was all blackened from Reindeer exhaust.

His breath smelled like peppermint, gone slightly stale,
And he puffed on a pipe, but he didn't inhale.

His cheeks were all rosy and jiggled like jelly,
His boots were as black as a cropduster's belly.

He was chubby and plump, in his suit of bright red,
And he asked me to "fill it, with hundred low-lead."

He came dashing in from the snow-covered pump,
I knew he was anxious for drainin' the sump.

I spoke not a word, but went straight to my work,
And I filled up the sleigh, but I spilled like a jerk.

He came out of the restroom, and sighed in relief,
Then he picked up a phone for a Flight Service brief.

And I thought as he silently scribed in his log,
These reindeer could land in an eighth-mile fog.

He completed his pre-flight, from the front to the rear,
Then he put on his headset, and I heard him yell, "Clear!"

And laying a finger on his push-to-talk,
He called up the tower for clearance and squawk.

"Take taxiway Charlie, the southbound direction,
Turn right three-two-zero at pilot's discretion"

He sped down the runway, the best of the best,
"Your traffic's a Grumman, inbound from the west."

Then I heard him proclaim, as he climbed through the night,

"Merry Christmas to all! I have traffic in sight."

E is for Emergency

2010-12-14T00:00:00.000-08:00

E is for Emergency(ies)

And we do get the odd one from time to time out here. Most of the time they are a non-event. A cockpit indication that may or may not mean something is or isn't going to do what you want it to do when you need it to do what it is supposed to do when you ask it to do it.

We have a prettty clear view over to the fire hall on the other side of the field, so when they roll the crash trucks, all the flashing lights usually catches someones eye. The call on the radio on our end is usually that " someones getting a parade ". I like to grab one of the handheld Icom radios and tune into Tower frequency and listen in. The ARFF ( Aircraft Rescue Fire Fighting ) trucks will usually position themselves at the arrival, mid-point and departure end of the runway where the parade-recipient is landing and once they are down they will go onto the runway and follow the aircraft.

If it's a real emergency, the aircraft usually stops on the runway. If its an emergency of the faulty-instrument-bulb variety, then they will follow the plane to the gate and then go back to the firehall.

When it's the real deal, the fire trucks will relay to tower a discrete frequency for the aircraft to speak with them directly on, so they can coordinate shutting down engines, putting out brake fires, evacuating or de-planing passengers and what not.

In this particular case, it was a rejected take-off caused by birds being ingested into one of the engines causing the engine to fail quite spectacularly. There was a loud series of bangs and a couple big puffs of smoke. Then they sent out FodZilla, our airport's resident street sweeper truck, to clean up the mess on the runway. If you look closely, you can see the big FodZilla sticker on the side of the truck.

FYI - FOD is an abbreviation for either Foreign Object Debris or Foreign Object Damage, depending on whether you found the offending Foreign Object before or after it hit or was ingested by an aircraft.

E is for Eating

A favorite pastime of mine...and something I routinely get to do in the airport environment. We tend to get a fair bit of left-over catering off arriving aircraft. Especially the larger aircraft that transport sports teams. If there are 40 people on board, there are 40 Chicken and 40 Fish meals, along with snacks, drinks, desserts. If you are chartering a transport category aircraft for only 40 people, the catering bill is the least of your concern. The crew already tucked one away in their luggage for the hotel room and since you helped them get their gear out of the cargo area, tidy up the cabin and run them to the hotel, you'll usually get a stack of the meals, a tray or two of cheese, meats, desserts and whatever else they have for your troubles.

One of my neighbours just completed his flight-attendant training and they happened to do the on-aircraft portion of their class at our FBO. I ran into him a few times and took the opportunity to " train " him myself on the important aspects of line-crew / flightcrew relations and upkeep thereof. Give the food the the lineguys before the catering trucks show up and pitch it all in the garbage and you'll never carry your bags down the air-stairs yourself again.

E is for Engine Start

When we're marshalling out an aircraft, one of the more important things we're doing is helping to make sure engine start is done safely. The part most people see is all the arm-waving when the planes are moving to or fro their parking spot, but for the most part, the pilots know where they are going. The marshaller is really just there to watch out behind the plane, where the pilot can't see and assist in tight quarters to make sure they don't run into anything. I've talked to some guys who are quite convinced they are running the show when they get a hold of a couple lighted wands, but I know better. We are an added layer of safety, like chocks on an air-brake equipped truck.

Once the passengers and crew are aboard, the marshaller takes up position in front of the nose of the aircraft, in eye contact with the captain, who sits(usually) in the left seat. When they work their way through the checklist to the part where they want to light up an engine ,they will hold up one finger or two, depending on which engine they want to start. The marshaller will signal in return by pointing to the concerned engine with the wand and waving the other wand vertically, over his head in a circular motion.

Engines are numbered 1 through whatever, usually just 2, but in theory, as many as 8, starting from the captains left, or the aircrafts left wing.

The marshallers main job during engine start is to make sure there is no one passing behind the aircraft and that the general area is clear. if it isn't safe to do so, the marshaller will hold the wands up, crossed in an X, indicating to hold off on starting. Unfortunately, this whole dance is so routine, that it can be hard to get the pilot to stop. They are expecting you to indicate all-clear, you have the last 100 times. More than once I've requested a stop, had eye contact with the pilot while indicating not-clear, and have them carry on and start up anyways.

The other function during engine start is fire-watch. A lot of fuel is moved around during start and not all of it gets burned. Some aircraft actually leave a little puddle of unburned fuel on startup or shutdown. The marshaller needs to be ready to signal the pilot in case there is any type of fire. Its one marshalling signal that a lot of marshallers don't actually know as they probably learned it once and then never used it again.... I suspect if you used the proper signal they wouldn't know what the hell you were trying to say. The look on your face though would probably give it away. I think I would resort to basic (frantic) hand gestures if I got any sort of confused look from a pilot if I ever had to use that particular marshalling signal.

Someone just mentioned to me the other day that the mechanics that were on trial for the crash of the concorde in Paris were found guilty of manslaughter recently.

Basically, an American Airlines aircraft that departed before Concorde, left a part of some kind of the runway. That part, once run over by Concorde, proceeded to be deflected upwards at highspeed, puncturing the wing and fuel tank just before take off. Leading to a large in-flight fire, crash and the death of all aboard and the end of the Concorde altogether.

I would like to think of France as being a civilized country and I sincerely hope that if there was negligence on the part of the mechanics, that it was gross negligence in order to find them guilty. I'd hate to think there was simply pressure to scapegoat someone. Particularly given the clientele that usually rode around on Concorde. The cynic in me wonders of those particular passengers and surviving families might have a bit more sway than usual... I'm all for being accountable, especially when your job demands it by its nature, but it seems easy to take it too far sometimes.

D is for Diesel

2010-12-12T23:25:00.000-08:00

This is a little out of order, as this happened a few months ago, but I just found the pictures, so bear with me.

Over the summer, I went for a fun little flight with a friend of mine from work, Bruce. Bruce recently went to one of the local flight schools to renew his Private Pilots License and in the process, got himself checked out in the schools shiny new Diesel Powered 172.

Most 172's run on AvGas ( 100 Octane, Low Lead - 100LL or AvGas ), but this one has a diesel engine in it and it actually runs on Jet-A, Jet fuel. Jet Fuel and diesel and very similar, in fact I think the only difference is diesel has some added lubricants in the fuel, where Jet-A is quite a bit "drier". You can run Jet fuel in a diesel powered vehicle ( don't get me started, but you can run almost anything in a diesel!! ) but its not recommended for repeated or prolonged use. I suspect diesel fuel will run just fine in a jet engine as well, except for the small problem of it voiding manufacturers warranties and requiring six-figure engine rebuilds to satisfy re-certification....details...

It is also a very new airplane, and has what is known as a FADEC system. I'm a little fuzzy on the details, but I think its Full Authority Digital Engine Control. Essentially, its fuel injected and a computer runs not only the engine and fuel mixtures, but also the propeller RPM to coordinate different power settings as well. I think it does a few other wizard-y things as well.

One of the neat little tricks it does is a push-button run-up. Get yourself set up in the run-up bay and hold down the run-up button and it goes through all the checks on the engine and gauges for you, giving you a green light when its done. cool.

Except that it does the run-up at full power....yikes.

It has a constant speed prop, but with the FADEC system, you'd never know it. You simply set percentage of power required on the throttle and the wizards match engine and prop power output for you.

We took off out of Boundary Bay and flew up the coast to Powell River, an airport Bruce hadn't been to before, but I had been into a couple of times.

A fun trip and a chance to fly with someone I hadn't flown with before. ( I reciprocated a few weeks later and posted the details of a trip to Qualicum in one of the ultralights, in case he looks familiar ).

We didn't do much at Powell River, mostly hung around the airport watching this guy do long-line practice with a helicopter.

It was kind of funny actually, he called up on the radio after we announced our arrival intentions about 10 minutes out, but neither of us caught that he was a helicopter. Once we got into the circuit, he checked in again and said he'd be " over the threshold of XX runway ", which confused us..till we spotted him and it all became clear.

On the way back, we came across a new Diamond TwinStar in flight and they asked us over the radio if we had a camera on board. I replied that we did, and we proceeded to take a few nice air-to-air shots of it for them.

This is the same Twinstar I later took a look at for doing my MIFR in. Shiny.

A local Hostel and Machine shop in Gibsons also had burned down the previous day, got a picture as we flew over, but it didn't really turn out.

D is also for DI's

A DI is a Daily Inspection. Done on all our Fuel Trucks by the Day Shift folks. I used to work Day Shift and used to do the DI's as well. When you get your commercial drivers license, one of the big things that you have to do and show an examiner that you can do, is a pre-trip inspection. A DI is essentially just a pre-trip, but since our trucks are in continuous use all day, we basically just do one big "pre-trip" at the beginning of the day. I remember in the driving test they give you a set amount of time, twenty minutes I think, and they warn you five minutes before time runs out. Not that all the requisite items aren't being checked, but the Test pre-trip and a real-life pre-trip are two very different animals. On the test, you're under the truck with the coveralls on and inspecting frame rails for cracking. In real life, its a flashlight on bended knee.

D is for D

My Airport pass is a "D" pass, it allows me into the airside restricted area, and it also allows me to operate a vehicle on an active taxiway, runway or apron. It requires a security check, a radio operators license and a driving test with the airport authority. Another type of pass is a D/A, which allows vehicle operation airside, but only on the ramps and vehicle corridors and service roads, no driving anywhere that requires a clearance.

D is for Ducks

We've got a lot of them at our airport. A major river delta along a migratory path, go figure. The airport authority has a few guys in trucks whose job it is to drive around all day and scare of the ducks, geese, hawks, eagles and other wildlife. They've got all sorts of noisemakers, sirens, firecrackers and lights to keep the birds away from the runways. I had one pop by the FBO one night when I was working graveyards and he showed me all the gear they give him.

There was a pistol in the console of the truck and a shotgun in a rack as well. I thought they used them to fire off the firecrackers, but they were the real deal and he said they do use them. Particularly if the bird is nesting airside, they tend to get the short straw as there is little reasonable way to keep them from coming back I guess.

D is also for Dirty Diapers.

Not many of them on the ramp, but I've got a few!!!

C is for Circadian Rhythms

2010-10-24T11:23:00.000-07:00

Ok, before I get into the flimsily disguised motivational trick I'm trying to use to actually post an entry, a quick update on happenings.

This is for the odd person who reads to keep up with happenings in our little family as opposed to the incredibly boring and trivial aviation stuff I try to stick to with this blog.

So, we had a baby girl about two months ago and she's doing great! The sleep schedules and feeding-changing-burping-wailing cycles are getting rhythmic and less and less daunting by the day. Your daily schedule starts to be more and more predictable, but still a handful to say the least.

The last month or so we've developed a pretty good night time schedule that gaurantees both of us a solid 6 hours of uninterrupted sleep. Unfortunately, as of late, Our Little Girl ( OLG ) has developed a penchant for sleeping ON us instead of near us, or in a crib / basket / desk drawer / cardboard box like she used to be satisfied with.

On the one hand, there is nothing better than looking down at her little face snuggled into your chest sleeping peacefully. On the other hand, there is nothing more frustrating than having a big chunk of "free" time, while she is sleeping and being completely immobilized and unable to accomplish anything more usefull and productive than gazing at her.

We've had lots of suggestions from friends and family and have been reading some great books about different methods of sleep training, but its a slow process of trial and error.

She's eating about 70/30 Formula to Pumped Breast Milk, and we sometimes wonder how the heck breast-feeding moms can keep up with the demand! Bottle washing / sterilizing and mixing formula is a new little routine around here.

Diapers aren't nearly as bad as I thought they would be pre-OLG. I had heard stories of hundreds of dollars a month to keep up, but its not nearly so bad.

Still waiting for her to smile on a regular basis. We've had a few, but it's hard to realistically not blame them on gas.... most of them have been random just-waking-up or falling asleep moments as opposed to our efforts to make her smile.

Her little SIN card showed up the other day too, a few days after her birth certificate. It's official now, her sovereignty has been recognized by the state.

I did some shopping around at the local flight schools to find one to do my multi engine rating and IFR rating at this winter. Commonly done together, this rating is usually referred to as a MIFR or multi-eye-eff-arr. This would allow me to fly an aircraft with more than one engine and also to fly one on instruments alone. Done together, as the IFR part has to be done for the type of aircraft you want to fly under instrument rules. You can do a Single-Engine IFR ( called a Group 3 ), but its not nearly as useful as the multi-engine variety ( Group 1 ). Most outfits that fly their aircraft under IFR rules, use multi engine aircraft.

A few non-aviation folks I've talked to about this have asked such things as " so, then you can fly a 747? " or " are you hoping to get on with Air Canada, I hear they are hiring ? ".

Short answer is no.

My bare commercial license with a MIFR rating attached to it, hopefully by spring, will simply allow me to expand my job search a little bit. A few more bullets in the gun so to speak.

One outfit that I spoke to, and asked me to stay in touch with them, flies both single and multi-engine aircraft. The single engine aircraft are flown under VFR, the multi ones are IFR machines. While I would technically be qualified to fly the singles, and that would be the entry-level position I would hope for, my value to them is drastically reduced as that would be the limit of my usefullness. The IFR rating, while not immediately usefull in that scenario, would give me a little more value as a longer(ish) term employee to them.

To simplify as well, for those who tuned in for the first non-aviation bit and are still hanging around, VFR and IFR are the different sets of "rules" that airplanes fly under.

VFR is Visual Flight Rules. No going into clouds, keeping the ground in sight at all times, occasionally talking to Air Traffic Control and always using the see-and-avoid principle of other-airplane-and-large-immovable-object avoidance. The primary instrument that the pilot uses while flying under VFR is the windshield coupled to a calibrated set of mk I eyeballs.

IFR is Instrument Flight Rules. Going into clouds is OK and the windshield as a navigational and operating instrument is only used during certain phases of flight. Most notably landing and taking off. While you've heard of airliners that " land themselves ", this is not very common. More often than not, once the gadgets, gizmo's and little wizards have guided you electronically through the sky to your destination, once it's there( the landing runway ), filling the windshield, you would visually land your plane just as a VFR airplane would.

For those of you that know better, please play along, I'm trying to simplify this and leave out all the subject to, unless otherwise authorized by the minister, except in cases of subsection 4(b)1-3 type of stuff.

In any case, the MIFR is back on the radar for a couple of reasons. First of all, my original " plan " of flying floats for a few years to " build time " in order to get considered for year-round work, is, upon closer inspection not a very good option for us. Most of the guys I met who are doing that, get 2-300 hours a year, if they are lucky. For that they need to uproot every summer and live apart from loved ones. For every one of those hours they get, they also spent 2-3 hours fixing outboard motors, building docks, repairing cabins, guiding fisherman, cutting up ungulates and doing whatever else was required. The flying I like, the ungulate-cutting I can take or leave.

So, I did my due diligence and made the rounds of the more reputable outfits in town that provided this type of training.

School#1

One outfit I went to had a nice little twin-engine trainer, a little rough around the edges, like most training aircraft, and a helpful staff and instructor. They took the time to walk me through their course, show me the plane and in general, try and sell me on choosing their operation. Its hard not to be cynical during this process as this is their business and you are a customer. Similar to the car salesman telling you how fantastic you look behind the wheel of whatever model they are trying to sell you, you get lots of " oh, you knew that? Well, you should be able to breeze through this course! ". This outfit also had a recent change of ownership and kudos to them ,very customer service focused and professional. Unfortunately, they share a Simulator with another, very busy, school and only have one instructor who does the MIFR training. The single instructor bit isn't too big a deal, but I worried about sim access. Since so much of the IFR course can be done in the sim, I didn't want to be stuck fighting for slots while being at the bottom of the pecking order behind another schools own students.

School #2

Another one, had a very modern multi-engine trainer. So modern in fact, that it made my spidey senses tingle... While everyone else in the area is using 20 ( and up ) year old aircraft to do flight training in, these guys are using brand new aircraft. Their rates are competitive with everyone else as well, so its hard not to be cynical about their business model. I did however go in and talk to them and while the CFI was very nice, and a bit of an internet / forum / blogosphere celebrity, I decided to take a pass. Most of their students seem to be overseas and foreign students, in itself not an issue at all, but I just felt a little out of place. The CFI wasn't in when I popped over and the young instructor who I spoke to didnt seem too interested in selling me on their offerings. The extent of his pitch was that I " could go sit in the plane...if I wanted to. " I did, of course, and enjoyed a nice chat with the CFI a bit later, but in the end decided that while shiny, fancy and modern, I probably would be better served training on the type of aircraft I am more likely to be considered to fly in....20 years and older.....

Some days it seems like by the time I get to plunk myself down in a "modern" airplane, they won't be very modern anymore...

School#3

#3 was where I did my original flight training on, both my private license and my commercial license.

I enjoyed my PPL course there, but again, felt out of place during the latter half of my time there. Too many barely-20-somethings with giant mirrored sunglasses and frankly, a lot of people on staff who had no idea who I was after flying there 2 or 3 times a week for two years. A good outfit, and a great reputation locally, but a few too many times standing in front of the counter waiting for the young instructors to finish their personal conversations while my booking slot on the aircraft dwindled away....

School#4

#4 was a place I had heard a few good reviews about on AvCanada, in particular about their CFI. I went over there expecting to spend 20 minutes to a half hour getting the schpiel, brochure and sit-in-the-airplane tour, but ended up with an hour and a half with the main MIFR instructor and a free half hour playing around in the sim.

I have to admit, my attitudes towards flight training have changed quite a bit since the first dollar I plunked down. In the beginning, I was pretty much in awe of everything they had to say and, frankly, a bit naive about the whole thing. Now, I definitely feel its more of a business transaction. I need X service, have determined the market is charging X dollars and I want a competitive rate, but will pay more for the parts of the service I have decided are worth more to me in particular. Well maintained aircraft that are available when I need them, instructors who are good at their jobs and willing to work around my schedule to some degree and a general sense of continued appreciation for my business.

Their facility was fantastic. Clean and professional looking, nicely organized and well kept. The airplanes were plentiful, well equipped and well maintained. Fresh paint and new interiors are nice, but a seat-back pocket with no 3 month old sick-sacks, 43 pens rolling around on the floor and a complete absence of oil-soaked paper towels tells me more about how the employees and owner treat the equipment and their customers.

The owner took the time to get to know me a little and I was sold when I watched him running around greeting everyone who walked in the door while simultaneously cleaning the office and making fresh coffee. You could tell he truly has his heart in his business. It's always possible that he's a raging tyrant away from the customers eyes and that explains the meticulous appearance of the operation, but his staff seemed a little too happy to be there as well.

Its kind of funny though, they share a very similar name with another flight training outfit at the same airport, but this other outfit is bizarre. I'm not even making this up, but on their website, under the corporate officers of the company, they list one female member of the board with a corporate title of " model / actress ". I swear there is even a picture of her draped over a sports car wearing a fur coat. yeah.

So, I picked up my books and spent the next two weeks doing all the pre-reading for the course.

The Multi rating is first, so a couple of texts on multi engine handling and theory, the course syllabus itself, as well as the airplane's flight manual ( AFM ) or Pilots Operating Handbook( POH ).

On reading through the multi-engine texts, I got a little chuckle. The aforementioned " modern " aircraft offered to me at the other school was mentioned a few times. In at least three separate cases the book would go into detail on semi-complicated procedures such as constant-speed prop control, prop feathering or engine mixture leaning and then at the end of the chapter they'd mention, " except for the ACME Super-Duper Model A, where you only need to press a button. ". I almost wonder if its too fancy for its own good, particularly as a training aircraft.

More posts to come on the multi-course, I've done some simulator sessions as well as a flight in the aircraft itself as of this writing, but I'm hoping to put together its own post on that later.

Oh, Right. Ramp workers Alphabet.

C is for Circadian Rythmn

Like with a newborn, better get used to modification. Large airports are generally 24/7/365 operations. Someone has to work the graveyard shift....guess who, junior boy?

C is for Chocks, Cones and Carpets.

At the FBO, every arriving aircraft has at least two of its landing gear wheels " chocked ", so that the pilot can release his parking brake ( or not set them in the first place ) allowing us to tow the airplane off to its hangar spot or ramp parking space later. We can still tow it with the brakes on, but the black rubber marks makes our ramp look bad.

Wingtips, nose and tail also get a safety cone. A lot of the time you have limo's, golf carts, fuel trucks, tugs and other vehicles operating in close proximity to the aircraft. The cones are pretty cheap insurance against multi million dollar fender benders.

I like to make sure the left wingtip gets its cone first. The baggage compartment on most business jets is on the left rear and the passenger door on the left front. First out the passenger door is usually the FO, who bee-lines for the baggage compartment to get the bags coming out before the passengers even step off the aircraft. More often than not, the passengers will follow and collect their bags as they come out. They could just go inside and we will bring them in, or even take them straight to their cab / limo, but the new-money folks always try to walk around to the back to get their bags. Indubitably, they cut the corner at the wing as they come around and I've seen more than one snag a static wick on their way. Small pointy, stick looking things that project off the wingtips and trailing edges of the wing and horizontal stabilizers to dissipate static while airborne. Can make a nasty cut or puncture if walked into and can be expensive to replace.

These are typical of the chocks we use. These particular chocks are tied to a truck and there is a little story behind that. A few months ago, HQ came out with a new directive that all fueling trucks must be chocked when the driver is out of the cab, particularly when fueling an aircraft. Now... all of the trucks we use have Air-Brakes. Air Brakes were designed specifically for large trucks as a fail-safe system to prevent them from rolling away. The way they work is that a metal spring actually activates the brake piston, instead of hydraulic pressure supplied by a pump, supplied by power from a running engine. This way, even if the engine is not running, the brakes will have " power " from the metal spring. In fact, you need the high-pressure air supplied by a running engine ( via a compressor ) to actually release the brakes and keep them released. If the engine dies, or any part of the air line is ruptured, brakes come on...and stay on.

So, to put chocks under the tires, is a little over the top, some might say. There is a slight chance that you would forget to set the brake in the first place, and get out of the truck with the engine running and the chocks would in fact save the day.

In any case... much debate from everyone about this extra precaution... Some pointed out that if there was an emergency ( fire ), you might want to drive away without the delay of pulling the chocks. It only took a couple days before a few of us did that unintentionally and found you can drive right over them without even noticing. The only way you can tell you did it, was that everyone within view of you is giggling and pointing at you.

Then the other argument came up that if there was an emergency and you drove away , leaving the chocks behind, that they would be a tripping hazard for the responders. I personally thought this was the silliest thing I'd heard yet. I think if a fire-fighter is prepared to come running up to a giant, thin-gauge aluminum structure, filled with jet fuel and people, they aren't going to be scared of my little chocks getting in their way.

Thats why these chocks are tied to the truck. You drive away from these bad boys and not only do the people in the immediate vicinity get to laugh at you, but so does everyone you come across allll the way back to base, watching them bounce along behind you.

I also mentioned in the discussions was my personal philosophy on the issue. So long as the companies cheques keep clearing my bank account, they can ask me to do all manner of silly things. In fact, since I get compensated per hour of my time, they are more than welcome to give me more and more tasks, silly or otherwise. In light of the above compensation-by-the-hour, I also have to admit a soft spot for a company willing to pay ME money to do tasks which cost IT real money, but add a layer of safety for ME.

C is for Cold.

Both the Viral and Climatic types. I'm currently enjoying neither.

We've had a couple " snow events " as we call them out here on the Wet Coast. The rest of Canada of course, calls these types of events "winter", but its not normal for us. ( Read: haha - suckers. )

I'm still stubbornly refusing to get winter tires on my car. I don't even have all-seasons, just summer tires. Since I learned to drive in the frozen wastelands of Edmonton, I figure my summer-tire equipped car coupled with above-(lotus land)-average winter driving skills, puts me pretty much on level footing with the rest of this city and their newly acquired studded tires for their Mercedes Benz SUV. Except I usually get home at the end of my shift and they've abandoned their SUV's en masse along the freeway. Seeing them sitting there, hopelessly immobilized by an inch of snow is more than funny.

C is for Canadair

Managed to snap a few pics of this guy taxiing away from the customs ramp. He just landed here to clear customs and then took off for points unknown. I believe this is a Canadair 215 water bomber.

It originally came with big old radial engines, but has since been converted to turbo-props. They now make this plane factory-stock with turbines and I believe the newer model is a Canadair 415. I think I remember someone telling me that they call this a " Duck ".

C is for Chicken

Entirely non-ramp related, but this guy knows how to play it.

C is also for Cloud Bases.

Depressingly low lately. TLW keeps scratching her head when I tell her my flight lesson was cancelled because of weather. I have to explain that although I am training towards flying in cloud, I'm not there yet. Nor is a lot of the training apt to be in cloud either. Our freezing level out here is very typically 2-3000 feet AGL / ASL out here in the winter and so are the cloud bases. From what I understand, flying our non-ice equipped training aircraft into a large collection of just-freezing or about-to-freeze water droplets isn't conducive to continued flight...

Odds and Ends

2010-10-06T22:34:00.002-07:00

I was going through my bag the other day, and found my little digicam languishing at the bottom, amongst a pile of paystubs, plastic safeway lunch bags and all the other stuff that just sort of piles up in my little work-backpack. Every once in a while I go through it and am just amazed at some of the stuff I have been faithfully carrying to and from work for WEEKS.

Anyways, found a few pics on the camera that I hadn't posted before, so thought I'd clear them out. Here goes;

Kaman Helicopter

This is one of the goofiest looking machines I have come across, but apparently its quite the performer.

I like the eyes in the front window too, nice touch.

This part just blew me away though. Out on the trailing edge of each blade was what looked like an aileron to me. I pondered it for awhile and then saw the pilot and asked him about it.

Most Helicopters, ( Read: all of them, except for this one. ) control the pitch angle of their blades by means of "twisting" them from the base outward. Imagine the blade spinning around the hub and in/on the hub is a cam of sorts that lifts ( increases the angle of attack ) the blade as it goes through that section of the spinning disk. So, you want to increase lift on the left side of the disk, the mechanism ( because I don't know its proper name ) lifts each blade as it passes through the left side, and lets it back down again once its passing through centre. Net effect is the left side creates more lift and the disk tilts. Neat.

You can do the same for the front side and back side of the disk as well, tilting the plane of rotation fore and aft as well. The helicopter tends to follow the spinning disk as well, it doesn't have a lot of other options.

Helicopters represent a sort of arcane, dark art to me, so I am both intrigued and intimidated by them at the same time, similar to higher math. Why the square root of some things can be so remarkably and beautifully elegant as the solution to a problem boggles my mind, much the same way as voodoo and yogic levitation.

In any case, back to the little aileron out there on the spinning blade. When the pilot(wizard) so wishes, he can, by deflecting the aileron into the airflow as the blade is spinning, cause an opposite reaction to the long skinny blade. It twists. So the cam system must still be at work, causing the aileron to rapidly deflect and un-deflect depending on which side of the disk you wish to have more angle of attack, but it is the same effect as the system everyone else uses. But totally different.

I like how the big jets kick up some a fantastic trail of moisture roaring off a wet runway. Seeing the jet blast is pretty impressive, being able to actually take a decnt picture would be even more impressive...c'est la view.

Of course, with the 727's, you don't need a wet runway, you can just watch the black smoke pouring out the back. Or, as someone put it on Avcanada the other day " a trail of David Suzuki tear's "

This thing came in a few times over the summer, I can't remember the name of it though... t-something trojan? Not sure...

Rumour had it that it is owned by he owner of Harbour Air and is a toy. It certainly parked on their ramp while it visited, who knows... I like the "guns" they added as well.

Apparently, as told to me last year, the Wright Cyclone engine is actually the very same engine as the PZL-ASz-62IR, 1000HP engine that a few DHC3 Otters have been converted to, including the one operated by the fishing lodge I worked for last summer.

The story was that under some backroom post-world war two deal, the Wright company ( yes, Orville and Wilbur ) sold the rights to PZL in Poland for the production of this engine and it has been produced with great success and in fantastic numbers since.

The other story I heard was that the Poles made a fantastic version of it, slightly improved from Wrights original design, but once they were under Soviet control, the soviets began production of their own PZL 1000HP engine with much less success, but even greater numbers. Apparently, if you get on with blue paint instead of Polish Grey, you have a Russian made Polish engine. Theres a joke in there somewhere I'm sure.

Oh, here is a picture of one of the Ultralights I was flying while working part-time as an instructor out at the ultralight field.

And here she is as of Tuesday afternoon.

Luckily, it sounds like no one was seriously hurt, a few cuts and bruises apparently and the plane is a write-off.

The story I heard was that the carbon-fibre prop de-laminated on them just after take-off and some or all of it departed the aircraft without further ado. They tried to make the field but clipped the power lines on approach. The Chief Instructor and a student were on board at the time. I haven't been out to the field for a while now so I haven't yet had a chance to talk to them and hear it from the horses mouth.

B is for Bush Planes

2010-09-26T16:50:00.000-07:00

Not much for Bush Planes in my daily life these days, but hey, you never know!

One of the qualities of a good bush plane is it's STOL capability. STOL is short for Short Take Off and Landing.

Hmm, considering they abbreviated the three-letter OFF as the O in STOL, why wouldn't they include the three-letter AND and make it STOAL?

In my ultralight flying this summer, I gained a lot more respect and a little more knowledge about Short Field techniques. Our field is technically 1200 feet long. Given the obstacles on both approaches, the usable runway is actually closer to 800 feet. Seeing as how the aircraft we use need only 300 or so feet for takeoff or landing, its not that bad. When you are used to 800 feet long by 20 feet wide, coming in to land at one of the local airports where you have 5000 feet by 100 feet of pavement stretching out before you, it almost seems silly.

For those not familiar, Short Field technique calls for landing the aircraft on a pre-determined spot ( close to the beginning of the "short" field to make use of all available runway ) and coming to a stop as quickly as possible, while remaining under control. Bonus points if the aircraft is usable again after you are done.

Mainly, it means making sure you you use the manufacturers recommended settings for flap and approach speed to come in at as slow a speed as is possible. Depending on whether or not you are also dealing with an obstacle on the approach path, you might also be coming in at a steeper-than-usual glide path, necessitating a more aggressive and hopefully well timed, flare.

With the slower speed on a short-field landing, you shouldn't have to deal with a lot of "float", the mains should touch down positively on the spot you aimed for. Dump the flaps to put some weight back on the wheels and get on the brakes.

Except we operate on grass and one of the planes I fly doesn't even have brakes..haha.

Grass is nice because its natural friction does a good job of slowing down the aircraft quite well. All three of our planes can be landed without using any brakes on the rollout, but thats on a perfect day.

D however, is for Digress, and thats a few days down the road.

B is for Brakes

At the FBO, after we've greeted the arriving pilots and passengers and made sure their immediate needs are attended to, we'll always ask the flight crew to make sure the brakes are left OFF before they leave. This is because they are usually directed up to the front of the building when they come in, so they can feel like rock-stars. Eventually, we will have to tow them off to some forlorn corner of the ramp to sit till their allotted " on-line " time before departure.

It's quite difficult to tow an aircraft whose parking brake is set on. Not impossible, but difficult. Most of out tugs have the capability of pulling a small to medium sized corporate jet with locked-up tires, across the ramp. Not from personal experience, but I do know that they leave quite a tell-tale rubber track from dragging the tires.

Personally, I like it when we hook up the tug and physically check that they are released even before the flight crew has left the premises. Even if you ask them to make sure the brakes are off, sometimes you go to tow it away an hour later and find out their partner went back and re-set them, or they weren't off in the first place. Sucks even worse when its three in the morning and you need to clear the ramp for the morning arrivals and you're having the crew woken up at the hotel to come down and release the brakes so you can tow it away...this I do know from personal experience.

Some companies even have a little sign they put up in the cockpit window that says " BRAKES OFF ". This is like.

Arriving aircraft usually have pretty warm brakes. I've never seen any glowing, but I'm told the airliners will sport glowing disks on occasion pulling onto the ramp.

I also noticed that aircraft brakes differ from car brakes, in that there might be 10 separate slave cylinders and disc brake pads per tire. On a car, you have one hydraulic slave cylinder and one set of pads to squeeze against the spinning disc.

I'm going to speculate that its a redundancy thing, no single cylinder to fail. Or perhaps a cooling issue, where its easier to cool ten small pads instead of one large one.

B is for Block Passes

Ramp access is pretty tightly controlled at major airports. All employee's requiring airside access need to get vetted by Transport Canada, the local RCMP and your friendly airport authority as well. This generally consists of a police check in each of the jurisdictions you've lived in for the previous five years, a criminal records check, a credit check, a fingerprinting and I believe they also run your name through the CSIS computer as well. There was CSIS form in the packet of stuff I filled out for my pass, but it's been awhile... Once this comes back clean, you get whats called a RAIC pass, also referred to as a Red Pass. RAIC is Restricted Area Identification Card. There is your photo on the front and both a magnetic swipe strip and a embedded chip on the back of the card with some biometrics for some of the gates ( retina and fingerprint ). The RAIC can also be upgraded with a "D/A", a driving permit for driving vehicles on the ramp and a " D " which is the all-access driving permit, allowing access to the taxiways, runways and all the other controlled areas where you might have to talk to Ground Control on the radio. Useful for towing planes around and driving the fuel truck out to some of the remote stands and oddball corners of the airport. I just recently upgraded to a "D" :)

It's kind of funny, because a pilots license and an aircraft parked airside will also get you through the gates. Like a lot of things in aviation, once you can prove you have the money to afford to fly/own/rent/train then everyone just assumes you're OK. Lots of airports I have been to have pilots "lounges" with fridges stocked with pop and snacks and a mayonnaise jar stuffed with bills and coins for you to place payment in. I guess if you can afford to fly in there, you're not going to pinch the 42 bucks in the jar or help yourself to a free coke. Kind of an economic profiling thing going on....

Some people need airside access at the FBO and don't have RAIC's. Limo drivers and maintenance personnel are good examples. These folks can come to us and as long as they convince us they have a valid reason for needing to be out there, and surrender some information, ID and a credit card, they can be issued whats called a " Block Pass ". This is a "Visitors" pass that allows them and/or their vehicle, temporary, escorted, access to the ramp. Technically the Block Passes are still property of the airport authority and woe betide us if we fail to get them back from these people before they leave! Hence the surrendering of the credit cards....

B is also for Bush Planes

I don't get to see a lot of bush planes these days, but I do see a few. We have a few residents Turbo-Beavers, Dehavilland DHC-2 Beavers that have been upgraded and modernized to be powered by a turbine instead of a radial engine.

Last summer, the turbine aircraft were few and far between, everything was piston. Now, piston aircraft are fairly scarce, reserved only for the smallest " piss-cutters " and radial engines are even scarcer around here.

Side-note - everyone I've ever talked to here and even Ontario, has referred to the smallest of aircraft generically as " piss-cutters ". I googled the term to see the origin and it didn't really have anything that was in relation to a vehicle, aeronautical or otherwise. Mostly in relation to Marine's hats?! I've heard this term my whole life, I'm quite surprised by this.

Aside from the odd DHC2T ( T for turbo ) we see the venerable DHC3T Otter and DHC6 Twin Otters of Harbour Air and the now amalgamated West Coast Air around a bit. Not on our ramp usually, but occasionally we are called over to their maintenance hangar to do a fueling for the mechanics.

You can always tell when its a mechanic calling for fuel instead of a pilot, they always ask for fuel in Pounds, not Litres or Gallons. Usually they only call when they need to do a leak-test on the tank or fuel system, and the maintenance manual will specify ( in Pounds ) how much fuel needs to be in the system for the test. Since a Litre of Jet Fuel is almost 2 Lbs by weight, this can cause problems if misunderstood. 600 Lbs, mis-fueled as 600 Litres may not even fit in some of these machines....

One of operators on the field has even acquired a spiffy, brand-new Quest Kodiak ( similar to this one pictured below )

I've had a look at the Kodiak, its a neat plane, but the fueling system makes me skeptical about the plane in general. It's got two over-wing fueling ports on top of the wing. Over wing fueling on a high-wing aircraft sucks. It means dragging out the ladder and climbing up, dragging your fuel hose with you. The ladder has to be positioned carefully as when you add the fuel, the added weight will cause the aircraft to settle, hopefully not onto the top of your ill-placed ladder.

Some planes, like the Beechcraft King Air 350, have auxiliary fuel tanks that have to be filled from on top of the inboard portion of the wing, BUT, further back than you can reach from your ladder at the front of the wing. So, everytime this plane takes full fuel, some fueler has to climb on top of the wing, dragging the hose across the leading edge, potentially damaging the de-ice boots or the wing skin itself. Take a close look at the de-ice boots on any well-used 350 or 1900 and you will see patches where they have been repaired....guess where? Yup, adjacent to the fueling ports. Surprise!

I look at it like this. A plane is fueled pretty much every time it goes flying. The designers will boast about the durability of their product. 50,000 hours on a commercial aircraft is not at all unusual.

So.

If their engineers have clumsy old me, or my rookie co-worker who just started yesterday, dragging fuel hoses up onto wings, walking over sensitive bits with their heavy boots, dripping fuel onto windshields, dropping the fuel nozzle onto even more sensitive bits, just to access their ill-conceived location for a fueling port.....what other ELEMENTARY logic has escaped them?? Sorry, I get to ranting on this one...

In any case... It looks like a good plane and it's neat to see a new generation of bush planes. We'll see where they are in the fifty or sixty years Beavers and Otters have been operating and then compare notes...

Here's one of my favorites, a Beech 18.

B is for Boats

Totally non-FBO related, but I did ship a few of these boats by Air Freight back in my previous life. They were for the German Police ( special forces ? ) GSG-9 and were sent down by truck to Seattle and then flown on a 747 freighter over to germany.

Loaded through the flip-up nose section of the aircraft.

And secured on the main deck. Note how the upper deck floor reduces the height on the main deck in the forward section. Kind of a drawback on this plane. If your cargo is long, it goes in through the nose, if it's tall, it goes in the side cargo door near the back. If it's long and tall....sorry. Doesn't go at all.

A is for Alphabetical

2010-09-25T23:55:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I haven't really posted much on here for over two months. This blog is on the verge of drying up and blowing away.

Yes, I have the birth of my daughter to excuse me for my lack of time, but things are slowly gravitating back towards some sort of normalcy and I'd like to try and keep this thing going. Its good fun and I like to write. Writing is a brain-engaged activity that makes me feel like I'm doing something...as opposed to playing video games or trying to study for the INRAT exam in fifteen minute chunks.

I got a great idea from Flygirl over at Always Looking Above, to do a series of posts alphabetically...A is for blah blah, B is for....you get the idea. She's a pilot-in-training nee flight attendant and her blog is a good read, I recommend it. Hopefully if I plug her and she sees a couple people clicking through from my link, she won't be too sore at me for totally ripping off her idea.

So, since my 350 hours doesn't really qualify me to post an alphabetical series on flying... I'm going to focus on my current job, Fuel Guy, Ramp Rat, Line Crew...but you can just call me Maverick.

Okay, so here's what I came up with for A;

A is for Asphalt.

Can't have a ramp without a whole lot of Asphalt. On our ramp we have mostly asphalt, coated with a sealant material to keep fuel from penetrating into it. We also have a couple of " Heavy Pads ", areas of the ramp made from re-inforced concrete to support larger aircraft. Considering we routinely handle aircraft in the 200,000 Lbs range, these are pretty important. All of that weight is concentrated in a few dozen square feet that the landing gear impress upon the ground. The asphalt can take the load, but not on a regular basis. Eventually, you'd end up with some serious dips, ruts, holes or worse.

This is a C-130, sitting on a Heavy Pad, the darker ground is the softer asphalt.

This landing gear does a little bit better in the weight-per-square-foot category. Bonus points if you can tell me what type of aircraft this is :)

A is for Arrivals

This is our Flight Tracker software. I've mentioned this before, but its what we use to track aircraft in flight. More and more aircraft though, are requesting to have their flight information hidden from view. Almost all are corporate aircraft and it just isn't as glamourous to be rich and successfull in these times I guess. Especially after the big fiasco with the automakers showing up in Washington DC in their corporate jets to beg for government handout money... Now every time a company announces lay-offs, all it takes is someone to run a story about the " fat-cats " in the jets while Joe Lunchbox takes a pink slip, to sell a few papers. This bothers me, but I'm thankful that it only bothers me because its lazy, reactionary journalism, not the jet-riding-around part.

A is for Aerodrome

I love how in Canada we call it an aerodrome. I can't help it, all I see is old WWI bi-planes and flying scarves.

Welcome to the world Eva!

2010-09-25T01:29:00.000-07:00

Haven't really had a lot of time for posting updates lately. Mostly because our little baby girl was born last month!

This is Eva Mackenzie

The labour was tough, from start to finish it was 48 hours, ending with an emergency C-section.

It was all worth it in the end, she's perfect!

We're now living our life in 2-3 hour chunks, between feeding, sleeping, burping, rocking and changing. Day / Night has lost its delineation and sleeping time is where you find it. 2 hour naps 3 or 4 times a day seems almost decadent now, it was a little tougher for the first few weeks, but things are improving as we get used to her and her routines.

They are definitely her routines at this point, she is the one calling the shots for now. I sheepishly brought up with her the possibility of perhaps setting some standard day/night routines and she promptly slapped my coffee out of my hand, knocked my hat off, pushed me down and took ten dollars from my wallet.

We also had been given a great gift by our friends Lindsay and Jason, a session with a baby photographer. The photos on this page are courtesy Charlotte Gamache Photography

Summer!

2010-07-09T22:21:00.000-07:00

Wow, ok, so summer has arrived on the West Coast.

Last week or so has seen us in the middle of an entrenched high pressure ridge that shows little signs of abating. I saw my first cloud today in over a week.

It was kind of funny actually, I was outside on the ramp with another fellow who has recently earned his Private Pilots License and as we looked at a bank of high cloud approaching in a seemingly organized fashion, he said " ok, so what type of front is that? ". I opined that I thought it was a warm front type of cloud formation, high, advancing cirrus that tapered down to what appeared to be some alto stratus type clouds. I keep an eye on the weather, so I hedged my bets with a " but, as there is little in the way of active systems in our area due to the high pressure, it may also just be orographic cloud from the mountains on the island. "

I like to know what is driving the weather on a daily basis. I check the weather religiously, flying or not. Not so much to try and predict or plan around my predictions of what will occur, but more to understand and learn from what I am seeing. If I know a warm front is approaching, when I look up and see the actual weather, then I know, " A-ha, my Met instructor was right! ".

Turned out I was right, but the system was far to the north of us, but the first band of clouds associated with the warm front managed to reach us this far south. It actually gave us a much needed respite from the searing heat of the last three days.

Out on the ramp, there is no shade. There is only black tarmac, the unrelenting sun, heavy boots, dark coloured uniforms that cover everything but your forearms to protect you from exposure to fuel, hats, ear defenders, sunglasses, utility belts, radios and mikes, heavy rubber fueling gloves and lately, a nice slippery sheen of sunscreen. It gets a little warm at times.

In any case, I wanted to post a quick blog update as I have been more than a little remiss lately. I think this is probably the longest I have let the blog lapse.

I'd like to have readers who keep coming back, to engage with them and hear their feedback on my daily life. I'd like to meet new people who share the same interests as me and have interesting stories of their own to tell. I'd like to keep friends and family updated on my life, without enriching the pockets of FaceBook founders through their prostitution of me and my life's little details. Alas, this kind of necessitates some effort on my part.

Anyways, in a nutshell, the last couple of moths have seen the following in the way of news that I would have liked to share, but didnt...

My wife's pregnancy is progressing nicely. We are down to the last two months now. In fact, only seven weeks to go till D-Day. This is no longer a distant, abstract event. This is happening! We've been very fortunate that her pregnancy has been pretty easy so far. A little nausea, treatable and treated. The usual mobility and fatigue challenges. But for the most part very manageable to date, knock on wood.

I finished my Ultralight Instructor Rating a few weeks ago and have begun instructing at the local ultralight field. I've done a few lessons and a mock flight test so far. I am finding instructing a lot more enjoyable and challenging than I first thought. I feel a very strong pressure to keep packing my head full of all kinds of information, "just-in-case" a student asks me " what type of front is that? " or " what makes the airplane turn? ". But at the same time, I feel very comfortable in the instructing role. I had lots of great advice from really good instructors during my training, all I really have to do is turn around and share those little nuggets with others.

I actually did that the other day with the mock flight test. I pretty much copied the flight test I did for the same rating. I have to remember to mention to the examiner that I did this, in case he pulls this student for the actual flight test. He may need to vary his routine just a little or the jig is up.

I went on a nice little cross-country trip the other day, up to Lillooet. This was a fun trip and had a few twists, so it is worthy of a post of its own, but it was nice to get out of the local patch and take an Ultralight on a long(ish) trip. It took us about 4.5 hours total, round trip.

I was helping put some aircraft into a hangar the other day and the hangar tenants Chief Pilot was there while we were working. We were joking around with him a little because their company, which owns several jets, helicopters and other large and expensive aircraft, also owns a Cessna 182 that he has been flying A LOT lately. Turns out, he is the only one in their company approved to fly it. Insurance maybe, or company-approved training that hasn't been done for the rest of the pilots, who knows. He mock-complained about the situation and one of my co-workers pointed at me and said " well, he needs the hours, let him fly it ". I was mortified, but he turned and asked me how many hours I had. " Around 300 " I told him. He raised an eyebrow and said I should talk to the owner.

I'll do it, but I suspect my lack of an IFR rating is going to preclude my being of any real use to them. It was kind of neat to see this job paying off a little though ,in the network-prospecting sort of respect though.

Anyways, I'll try and post a little more, but who knows, maybe I wont... Lots of things going on, all of them good!

Going to be a daddy soon, getting to fly on a daily basis and not paying for it, loving my job(s) and feeling a little more optimistic about future job prospects.

Ah well, watch my next post be tomorrow night about the tornado that I.did.not.see.coming that flattens my home....

Qualicum Trip

2010-05-27T23:09:00.001-07:00

Got to go out on a little adventure today.

I had been talking to one of the guys at work about going flying one day and it came together this morning.

Bruce has his PPL and just recently went out to one of the local flight schools and got checked out in one of their new Turbo-Diesel Cessna 172's. In doing the check out he also renewed currency on his pilots license, since it had been 5 years or so since he last flew.

I need a total of 20 hours ultralight time in order to apply for my Ultralight Instructor rating so we thought it might be fun to take a little cross country trip.

Bruce was much like myself when I did my PPL. Most of my cross countries were pretty local really. We had got to talking at work about how much fun it is flying into new and unfamiliar airports and the whole planning process in putting together a flight to somewhere you have never been.

I'm trying to at least take the written and do a " flight test " for my rating prior to the end of the month. I'm feeling a little hard-pressed though as time and weather are slowly starting to come together to not make it happen.

We had planned on going out yesterday, but we didn't get the weather for our primary destination, nor for our back-up alternate. Theres only a few directions you can fly in out here when the ceilings start to come down.

Our original plan was to go to a little strip up near Merritt, called Quilchena. Apparently there is a neat old Hotel / Restaurant right across the street from the strip and MoGas ( Automobile Gas ) is available from a gas station that neighbors the field. There are pictures at our little flight school building of planes being pulled across the road by hand and right up to the pumps to fill up.

Since the trip up through the mountains requires us to be able to fly through at least one high mountain pass, we would have needed a minimum ceiling of about 7500 Feet Above Sea Level ( ASL ) for a safe trip. And that only gets us through the pass, it doesn't give us much for options to climb out of the valley as the mountain tops would still be shrouded in cloud.

When we got to the field yesterday we didnt even have close to that, in fact ,while we stood there discussing our back up plan, the rain started and within a half hour, our options had dwindled down to the highway to drive ourselves home on.

Back again this morning to try again and while it started iffy, it quickly cleared up quite nicely.

In fact, according to the weather map, there was just the barest hint of a High pressure area, right where our alternate was. It was only there on one of the GFA weather charts as well, the forecast chart prior to our period and after had the High pressure area downgraded to just another curve in the isobars around the Low.

One of the guys who hangars his plane out at the field accepted our invite to tag along and Bruce and I took the Foxbat, while he flew alone in his beautiful little Piper Vagabond.

Basically a clipped-wing Piper Cub. He has upgraded the engine to ( I believe ) a 100 HP Lycoming engine, as well as a few other bells and whistles. A left side door for the pilot and a widened fuselage to accommodate two people in the front instead of tandem seating. He even has a small wind-driven generator hanging off the bottom that charges his battery and gives him Electrical power, something the original Cub lacked.

Off we went, up over the city and through the Downtown Harbour control Zone. I did a little practice with groundspeed checks and using the old whiz-wheel as its part of my upcoming flight test and something I havent done for awhile.

Bruce got some stick-time while I fiddled with a navlog and my trusty E6B.

Give us a smile Bruce!

Through the Harbour and now its up over Bowen Island and along the coastline, north-west bound for the Sechelt area.

Past Sechelt and over a little 8 mile stretch of water between Buccaneer Bay and the bottom tip of Texada Island.

A little detour to check out a small, unpublished dirt strip that sits on Texada. Nice enough lengthwise, but I'm not too sure about the surface condition, would definitely be an emergency-only option till I had a chance to talk to someone who had landed there before, or better yet, walk the runway myself.

The forecast clouds over the island weather stations turned out to be pretty localized and we had clear skies over the Strait of Georgia to climb up and get some altitude for the 10-mile stretch between Lasqueti Island and Qualicum Beach.

I had flown over Qualicum once before on a sight-seeing trip with my brother Jason, up from Victoria. I was freshly annointed with my PPL at that point and when we went to land at Qualicum ( it wasn't our destination, more just to check it out ), the gusty crosswinds had me end up doing a low approach only. It was my brothers first flight with me and I was already scaring myself trying to make a steady approach, no sense scaring him with a not-so-steady landing.

We taxied in and grabbed a couple spots on the grass, just off the main apron. An airport worker came out and very politely told us we wouldn't be able to park there, and directed us instead to another spot down the way. Another gentleman was with him with a clipboard that he was writing in. I thought to myself..." Oh, he must be recording our registration marks for a landing fee or maybe a parking fee... thats funny, I dont remember seeing any fee's in the CFS... ".

We parked over on the grass where they wanted us to and it turned out that the other gentleman was a Transport Canada Inspector doing a ramp check! He went through the whole thing with the pilot of the Piper that flew up with us and Bruce and I watched and listened from a polite distance.

I was a little nervous, figuring it would be my turn next, but once he was done with the Piper's pilot, he wished us all a good day and left. It was actually quite a friendly little encounter and not nearly as sinister as my imagination had it being. I've talked to lots of pilots who have flown for twenty plus years and never been ramp-checked, it was a first for all of us.

Over to the restaurant for a nice lunch out on the patio in the sun and then back from whence we came.

Coming back through downtown Vancouver, got to take a look at the floatplane base of the now-amalgamated West Coast Air / Harbour Air, as well as the Green Roof of the new convention centre.

BC place has also had the inflatable roof deflated, to make way for the new retractable roof they are putting on.

Spronk.

2010-05-26T16:01:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder how float planes get around on dry land?

Well, I'm going to tell you anyways.

They use a piece of equipment called " Beaching Gear ".

Essentially a hydraulic lift mounted off the front end of some sort of vehicel so the float plane can be picked up from underneath, down on the boat ramp, lifted into the air and driven around.

Mechanics tend to like working in dry hangars, where all their tools are and they don't have to contort like gymnasts to balance on and work under, a float plane bobbing around at the dock.

We had some fun with that last summer when the Otter went through an engine change and a "splitting " of its radial engine, right at the dock.

Since the aircraft was not flyable, and we had no ramp nor beaching gear to take it out of the water, the entire operation was done at the dock. We did the best we could, with a large plywood maintenance platform placed between the two floats and under the engine and it worked fairly well. But.... theres a lot of oil that comes out of a radial engine when you open it up. So, we strung plastic sheeting up underneath the aircraft as well. Very handy to collect spilt oil and dropped bolts.

The first time we did it, sans plastic, we ended up with a small slick and yours truly had to go diving for parts and tools dropped into the lake at least three or four times.

I am considering heading down to the gulf of mexico and showing those bozo's what I can accomplish with little more than a container of Sunlight dish soap on shore-encroaching oil slicks, but I bet they will figure it out eventually themselves.

In any case... Near where I work is a few different maintenance outfits that do a lot of their work on seaplanes. All of them have at least one set of beaching gear. Its kind of neat some of the vehicles they have mated the lifting apparatus to. Theres at least one Camaro, an Oldsmobile Toronado and a couple other oddball cars as well. Standard practice uses an old half-ton truck that is getting long in the tooth, but its neat to see the creativity of the mechanics.

A while back, I witnessed a beaching incident gone wrong.

The beaching gear is usually placed under the seaplanes " spreader bars ". Horizontal bars that hold the two floats apart and provide lateral strength and stability. The spreader bars are fairly lightweight material ( like a lot of aviation-y things ) but get their strenght in the direction that it is required, by their shape. Like a cardboard tube, very strong if its on end, but can be folded with ease if force is used against it sideways.

Where the lifting platform of the beaching gear pushes against the spreader bars is usually OK, as they lift at the very edges, where the spreader bar attaches to the float itself. At this point, there is an inner piece which reinforces the tube, as well as giving something that you can bolt through the spreader bar onto, to actually attach it.

Unfortunately, if you don't lift at this point of the spreader bar and instead try to lift from a point further in, where there is no underlying reinforcement inside the tube..... Particularly while bouncing down an old wooden float ramp...bad things can happen.

If you look closely in the background, you can see a Beaching Gear-mobile made out of a Toronado..I think. The bars of the lifting platform project forward of the " car " and are just barely visible...They are blue and about fifteen or twenty feet long.

I know the Toronado was a front-wheel drive car so perhaps that why they used it, as the back half of the vehicle is sacrificed in making it into its new configuration.

Oh, this is the same old wooden float ramp as well, being used by a Supermarine Stranraer of Queen Charlotte Airways back in the fifties ( possibly? )

I love how this airport is full of stuff that has been around forever. Old hangars that have seen dozens of airlines come and go. Sometimes run by the same people, different planes and at other times, same planes, different people...

Until they re-paved it last year, you used to be able to drive over the old hangar door tracks of the Boeing Factory that used to exist here, a long time ago...

On the other side of the field is one of my favorite places to walk. Its technically a " jetty ", a breakwater made from rocks. But... for those in the know, its actually a treated water dicharge pipe which takes treated sewage water and discharges it about 4 kilometres out into the Strait of Georgia. The Lovely Wife and I used to run out here whn we lived nearby. I liked it because the trail which runs on top of the pipe as well as alongside it, is marked every half-kilometre. 4 out and 4 back, but I never ran the whole thing in one go.

Oh, and the fact that it is right under the approach path doesn't hurt for a view either...haha.

One of my favorite aircraft types also came in for a surprise visit the other day too.

This is a "super" DC-3.

It popped in unexpectedly for a movie shoot in a nearby town and spent the night on our ramp before heading out the next day. The guys driving it were extremely gracious in giving me the grand tour.

I think it made it even better that it is a working plane as well, not a gussied up show plane. The back half was crammed with spares, tools and of course, oil. Like any good radial engine aircraft, its " Check the Fuel and Fill the Oil please! ".

It took me right back to last summer as well as soon as I stepped in the door. All the smells of a working plane

Spring has arrived

2010-04-29T12:08:00.000-07:00

Well, spring is definitely settling in around here.

All the trees have sprouted fast-growing leaves, flowers are up all over the place( have been for awhile actually ) and on any given day you can hear lawn mowers starting out on their first run of the year.

A month or so ago, I started looking seriously into setting out on a Flight Instructing course.

Of course, all the schools I spoke with said pretty much the same thing. " We'd love to take your money, but even in the best of times, we can't promise you a job, and trust us, these are NOT the best of times. ". I also came to the conclusion that I was starting this way too late in the year. The " busy " season for flight instructing out here is in the summer, of course, and I would need a minimum of two to three months to work my way through a Flight Instructor - Aeroplane course and get my flying (back) up to a reasonable standard. By the time I finished the course, most of the schools around here would probably be looking at the middle-to-end of their busy season and getting ready to whittle the staffing down for the winter months.

I did however talk with the manager of the local ultralight field a few times over the last couple of years, and decided to call him up and see what they had in the works. Turns out, they are optimistically looking forward to a busy summer and were looking at hiring a few people, particularly those who might be able to commit on a part time / flexible basis.

More than right up my alley, I've signed up and am about half way through my Flight Instructor - Ultralight rating course. Now, I know you think lawn chairs strapped to lawn mower engines and suspended beneath a hang glider, when I say Ultralight, but I am pleased to report, it is just not so.

There was definitely a period where ultralights evolved somewhat clumsily from the backyard lawnchair contraptions into what they are today, but trust me, those days are gone.

You can still go and get yourself an open-cockpit trike or an old school powered hang glider, but theres a lot more options to choose from nowadays.

One of the biggest changes, I am told, came about in the late nineties, when Transport Canada ( PBUH ), decided to diverge from the US standards of what an " Ultralight " is, and increased the gross weight limits, fuel capacities and a host of other things.

Suddenly, a whole segment of small-aircraft manufactureres could put a product to market without the exhaustive and intensely expensive certification process of a conventional aeroplane. In a lot of cases, smaller "certified" aircraft were made bigger/heavier only because the manufacturer had to only use bits and bobs from other manufacturers that had already been certified, and were not ideal for the purpose, but were far less expensive than trying to certify your own product, even if it made more sense from an engineering standpoint.

Say a small-plane manufacturer wants to use the head light assembly off a 2008 Honda Civic, as a landing light. The civic's headlight bits weigh 2 lbs and put out sufficient light intensity for use as a landing light. Tests in their use in cars have shown they are safe, efficient and durable in a transportation environment. But.... since using them in a conventional aeroplane requires them to be certified anew for aviation use, the cost is too prohibitive for the small company, who is trying to tap into a lower-cost segment of the general aviation market with their small plane. So, they use the old standard, originally certified in 1966, headlight assembly from ( insert obscure small airplane manufacturer long-dissolved and only operated by lawyers and investment bankers making piles of money off the rights to the certification and propietary use sales on long-obsolete, but CERTIFIED, equipment ).

ACME YE OLDE HEADLIGHT RIGHTS CO. sells a spiffy 14 pound assembly, made of fine handcrafted balsa wood and bakolite, encasing a 40 candlepower D-Cell battery-operated headlight.

Your cost to certify the Honda bits: 32,000CAD

ACME SUPER DUPER DISCOUNT rate for "certified" ( and completely obsolete from an engineering standpoint ) parts: 5,000CAD

In any case. One point someone made the other day was; if some of the older lighter aircraft, that everyone considers stalwart old-school, original airplanes were made today, they'd be licensed as ultralights. They fit in the weight category and would be much, much cheaper to sell. Which is kind of the point of the smaller aircraft, to put them within reach of the average pilot. Trust me, theres enough makes and models out there for the higher end crowd if you have a few million kicking around.

Sorry if I get to ranting a little. I see it in peoples eyes when I tell them I'm flying ultralights. They might not say it to my face, but I see it now and then and a few people have made a comment or two... I obviously don't feel the same way, or I wouldn't strap myself into one!

In any case, its been a blast!

The first couple weeks were spent doing groundschool.

Its truly amazing how little you actually know about something until you try to teach it to someone else. Subjects I thought of as having "down-cold" were suddenly giving me doubts, old acronyms were missing letters, formula weren't formulating and it was politely pointed out that the faux-lesson I just presented to my instructor-playing-student contained completely incorrect information. Ugh. Nothing like convincingly teaching someone completely wrong information!

I've built most of my lesson plans for the ultralight-permit syllabus, and still need to do some fine tuning, but we've since moved on to the flying part of the course. I have a few more PGI's ( Preparatory Ground Instruction - lesson plans ) to work up and rehearse / get critiqued on, but it's nice to get out of the books and back into and aeroplane.

Our school has three main aircraft that we train with. One I flew a few months ago on a fam flight / joy ride .

Alas, after my first training flight in this one, there was a hangar rash incident and it is down for repairs.

Hangar Rash is a nice little term used when an aircraft is damaged on the ground, usually during operations putting it into or out of a hangar. Where I work, we have a company policy of a minimum of three people on a tow into or out of a hangar. One person driving the pushing / pulling equipment and two more " wing-walkers " who take up position off the wings and/or tail of the aircraft to watch out for obstructions, walls, other aircraft that the driver may not be able to see as clearly from their position.

Given that a small dent on a wing or tail of a corporate jet can instantly cause tens of thousands of dollars worth of repairs ( I am NOT exaggerating ), this policy is well worth the manpower costs it exacts.

So, I have just finished my checkout on one of the other aircraft, a Rans S-6 Coyote.

( Not the actual plane )

Checkout consisted of a few flights with the instructor and going through some of the basic maneuvers that I would be teaching in it. Takeoff, landing, steep turns, slow flight, power on and off stalls, forced landings, precautionary landings and familiarization with its equipment, performance and checklists.

Now I will be doing a few solo flights to get a little smoother and proficient with the aircraft. My first flight in it without the instructor was an eye opener. Even more than a Cessna, the difference in performance with a single occupant is pretty dramatic.

The Coyote has a Vfe ( Maximum Flap Extension ) speed of about 65 mph. We use flaps on every takeoff as we operate off a relatively short grass strip, every takeoff is a soft field AND a short field takeoff. The aircraft will takeoff in less than 300 feet, so the 1200 foot runway is only " relatively " short. However, it has fantastic climb performance, particularly with a solo occupant, so you have to pitch up pretty aggressively on takeoff to keep the speed under 65mph to avoid over stressing the wings and flaps.

Something else that has been a bit of an eye opener is the rudder.

As it turns out, you actually need to use it in these aircraft.

I'm only half-joking, but its something I definitely need to work on.

On your basic Cessna 152 or 172, the rudder is used to control useful yaw and to counter any "adverse" yaw.

The only problem is, the engineers when designing these docile training aircraft, pretty much took care of all the adverse yaw. Sure, there is some adverse yaw effects that are unavoidable, but they are very slight in relation to some aircraft.

A good example of adverse yaw is Aileron Drag. When the ailerons are used, they deflect upwards on one wing and downwards on the other. This creates more lift on one wings and "defeats" lift on the other. The net effect is that the aircraft banks. Very useful when you want to turn. The problem is that whenever you create lift, you also create drag. So the wing that rises ( has more lift than the other ) has more drag acting on it than the other wing. This drag tends to pull the aircrafts nose in the opposite direction of the one in which you are trying to turn.

On a Cessna, the engineers came up with a couple different solutions to minimize this effect. The ailerons are " differential friese ", they project into the airflow more on the down-going wing in order to create some equalizing drag on the other side . The aileron on the lift-producing ( rising ) wing also project a little of the forward edge of themselves above the wing creating some more equalizing drag.

Net effect, on a Cessna, you roll the airplane with the ailerons and the aircraft banks into a turn and will start to turn in the direction you want it to. You might ( should ) add a little rudder to counter any remaining adverse yaw and make sure its a nice coordinated turn. If you are a new pilot, or just have " lazy feet " you might not put much, or any, rudder in and you will still turn.

I always told myself during my initial training that I would not have " lazy feet ". I listened to the old timers complain about the young whipper snappers and their lack of rudder savvy and mentally affirmed, " I wont be that guy. ".

Sure, I watched the ball in the turn coordinator, made sure it stayed in the middle as best as I knew how. I read Stick and Rudder by Mr. Wolfgang Langeswieche and made sure that whenever I moved the ailerons, I also moved the rudder.

Problem was, the engineers at Cessna cheated me out of a good education. The rudder amounts I put in were mostly a slight pressure on the pedals. Rarely did it need more than a slight nudge to keep the ball centred.

Now, flash forward to my time in the Coyote..... This plane has very simple systems. The compromises that keep it under 1200 Lbs means the rudder has to be used in its original design purpose.

I kid you not, if you do not use rudder, there are times when you bank the airplane and it will do nothing in effect of moving the nose in the direction you want it to. In fact, it is possible to bank the airplane in one direction and with your feet on the floor ( not using any rudder ) turn the airplane in the opposite direction you want it to go.

I finally get what they mean when they say " kick " rudder. The amount of rudder required, and the duration that it is applied is very much like a kick. Firm pressure, relatively quickly, while the ailerons are applied to start the bank, and releasing / applying opposite rudder as the aileron application is taken out.

It took me a few tries to get used to the grass runway and get over my nervousness as to its length ( or lack thereof ), but I actually feel a lot more comfortable on grass now then on a paved runway.

Yesterday I went out working on my checkout on one of the other aircraft, and we did some practice forced approaches in the circuit. This is where the instructor will randomly pull the throttle to idle and state " you have an engine failure ". The goal of the exercise is to make sure you can glide to a landing, on the runway, without power, from any point in the traffic pattern.

When I used to do these during my initial training, it was all about making the runway. A forced approach off-airport exercise was about running through the procedures in trying to get the engine re-started, communicating to ATC and your passengers about what you were doing and where, as well as making a specific chosen safe landing spot.

This time, the instructor asked that I go through the whole procedure while in the circuit as well, instead of just accepting the failed engine and concentrating solely on landing on the runway.

I guess this makes sense. Were it for real, I'm pretty darned sure I'd try to get the engine going before I accepted a gliding approach that "theoretically" should result in a normal runway landing. It did throw me for a little curve initially though, and I'm going to use that as the convenient excuse for a couple of fairly poor approaches. All of which were followed by some pretty darn good landings if I do say so myself.

I laughed about it with the instructor afterwards, I was as surprised as he was that a series of consistently poorly flown approaches, led to consistently decent landings.

I'm pushing to get the majority of the course completed by the end of May. In a perfect world, the whole thing. I need another 10 hours or so of flight in Ultralight category aircraft, as well as a pass on the written and flight tests.

One thing I am really enjoying though, is the atmosphere out at the field.

Most of the students are there because they want to get a license to fly for fun. Very few people will ( intentionally ) start the path to a commercial license with an ultralight permit. So, the main goal for everyone, along with learning of course, is to have fun.

Almost everyone I've met so far has that spark of passion for things aviation, a very good dose of curiosity, but mixed nicely with a its-sunny-lets-go-flying!!!! attitude that is very often absent around the flight schools that are training studious young types dead-set serious on an airline career.

Oh, this happened recently as well.

A Cathay Pacific A340 was the victim of a bomb-scare. A caller in Richmond, BC, according to the news, called in a bomb threat against this arriving aircraft. F-18 fighter jets intercepted it and escorted it down to landing in Vancouver.

The plane parked out on an unused runway and all the passengers offloaded onto busses. I presume to be interviewed.... Their bags were then offloaded and searched as well.

Moio sudno na vozdušnoy poduške polno ugrey

2010-03-16T09:10:00.000-07:00

This was one of my favorite visitors during the Olympics. Its a Tupolev 154 ( TU-154 ). Very similar to the Boeing 727, a loud, old-technology jet liner, with three engines arranged at the rear of the fuselage.

I thought at one time that these type of aeroplanes qualified as " Centre Line Thrust " types, but apparently not.

In a normal ( engines on the wing ) configuration, if one engine loses ( or two on the same side if you happen to be flying an extremely cool airplane ) power, a situation will exist where asymmetrical thrust will cause the aircraft to Yaw towards the dead engine. Not having a multi-engine rating, I'm not "formally" trained on this , but I have read a little bit. And I stayed in a Holiday Inn Express last night.

In some prop aircraft, there is the added hazard of one of the engines being the " critical " engine. It is critical, as the rotation of the prop and it's gyroscopic properties, will also cause additional yaw to the aircraft. If both the props are spinning in one direction, one of them will add to the total yaw moment being experienced by the aircraft and the other will subtract in an engine failure scenario. If you have yaw from only one engine providing asymmetric thrust and that yaw is compounded by the yaw created by the prop gyroscopically, you might have enough adverse yaw in the same direction to cause you to be unable to counteract it with the rudder.

This is solved in some aircraft by having the props rotate in different directions, or counter-rotating, if you will. This cancels out the critical engine effect regardless of which engine fails on you.

I imagine the reason all light twins are not counter-rotating is the costs associated with interchangeability of the engines, their mounts and all manner of ancillary equipment that hangs off of them. If they both spin the same way, you can mix and match, all the bits are the same on either side. In a counter rotating set-up, I think everything from the engine mounts to the props would have to be side-specific.

In any case, I guess the 727 and TU154 generate enough asymmetric power, even with their engines being relatively close to one another laterally, that they are not considered centre-line thrust. In fact, when I look up the definition of Centreline thrust, it specifies the "absence" of asymmetric thrust, not the amount of, as defining CL thrust.

Engines on an aircraft are numbered, starting from the captains left. In a twin, the #1 is on the left wing and the #2 is on the right.

In a 3 engine aircraft, #1 on the left side of the rear fuselage #2 in the centre and #3 on the right side of the rear fuselage.

There is an old story that the 727 was nicknamed a " Three-Holer ", not due to the fact that it had three engines, or air intake "Holes" but because it had three Lavatories.

Both the 727 and the TU-154 are loud. Very Loud.

I only saw the TU-154 land, so I can't comment from first hand knowledge on that one, but I fuel and see the 727 depart on a daily basis. The engines are loud enough on takeoff that you can feel it in your chest.

They also send out a giant plume of blackish smoke behind them as they power up for takeoff. I've seen pictures of old DC8s and 707s with the older generation engines taking off, and those kick up an incredible amount of black smoke. If those were around today, the environmentalist crowd would have a stroke.

I seem to recall that some of the older jet engines from that era were also water or methanol-injected. I also remember reading somewhere that the water/methanol was injected into the intake air to cool it evaporatively, causing it to be denser during compression. The side effect was partially burned fuel being shot out the back along with the water, causing a lot of black smoke. I could be wrong and I'm too lazy to google it. meh.

One thing that struck me about the 727 and the TU154 was the fact that the TU154 has a LOT of anhedral and the 727 has a modest amount of dihedral in the wing design.

Anhedral and Dihedral refer to the shape of the wings, wether they slope upwards or " droop " downwards in relation to the fuselage.

If you look at a Cessna 172, a high-wing aircraft, you can imagine that the fuselage of the plane acts like a keel when it is in flight. The weight hanging off the bottom of the wing, serves to stabilize it, just like a keel does in a boat.

So an aircraft with a low-wing, has the destabilizing effect of a lot of weight ( the fuselage ) sitting on top of the wing.

Thus, it is common for a low-wing aircraft to have the wings angle upwards. This moves the weight lower in relation to the wings and stabilizes things again.

In other aircraft, other bits of the plane, the wings, engines, stabilizers, etc, cause so much stability, that they need to " destabilize " things a little to make it possible or easier, to do useful things like being able to turn or climb. This is where Anhedral comes in, raising the fuselage up in relation to the wings.

Stability sounds like a good thing, but you can be too stable as well as too unstable. Some aircraft need to lean on the stable side of the equation, like airliners, as they are designed for heavy loads with smooth, easy flight characteristics. Other planes, like fighter jets, would prefer to be unstable, making maneuvering more dramatic and sudden.

The 727 and the TU154 have similar designs to my uneducated eye. Same engine-thrust setup, with the three-holer design. Similar size wings, fuselage and tail.

So why is the TU154 so obviously " destabilized " with the wing anhedral and the B727 " stabilized " with wing dihedral?

I'm sure there is a valid reason. Engineers, Russian or not, rarely tend to do things without a reason. Even if that reason is simply " because it looks cool ".

One other cool thing I noticed, and this might be related to the stability issue, is where the landing gear go.

On a 727, the fold inward, towards, and partially into, the fuselage. When they are down, they are just outboard of the fuse, under the junction of the wing and the fuselage.

On the TU-154, they fold backwards, into pods under the wing.

The landing gear are fairly heavy bits of airplane, by necessity of their function. Being in between 200,000 plus pounds of metal and the ground in a controlled collision, several times a day for the thirty years kind of dictates it. I wonder if having all this weight out in the drooped wings counteracts things?

I'm sorry, but the landing lights on the IL96 are just wrong.

Maybe its me, but it looks severely buck-toothed to me.

I tried to catch a picture of this while I was driving..

The Russians Are Coming.

2010-03-04T22:06:00.000-08:00

Well, actually, they've already left. But they were here.

One of the cool things that happened during the Olympics was the arrival of quite a few Russian built aircraft. We very rarely see some of these birds in North America, let alone Vancouver.

This is the Ilyushin 96, operated by the Russian State Transport company and came with some Russian dignitaries for the games. Rumours had it that Putin was on board, but I'm not sure about that. On further investigation, it looks like it was Medvedev instead.

They did have an advance team come in with an Ilyushin 76 ( a large russian freighter aircraft ) that had motorcade and security gear, but it was in and out so quickly I didn't have a chance to get over and take any pictures. I did get to see it land and takeoff though, that was a treat. The IL76 is actually a lot bigger than I though, I always assumed it to be the much smaller cousin to the AN124, but looking at it now, it is quite comparable.

This one I was very dissapointed to not have been able to see close up, or in flight. Its an Ilyushin 62. Very cool looking aircraft, with 4 engines mounted on the rear, similar to an MD80, but with doubled-up engines.

Like the IL96, once its passengers were offloaded, it took up a parking spot out on Runway 12/30. They parked a couple heads-of-state aircraft out there during the games.

I was actually a little surpised, as they shut that runway down and set up a little military air-base out on the Runway 30 end. This is where they staged the portable hangars for the CF-188 Hornets ( F18's ). My thinking was that if you have the runway all to yourself, with a base on one end where your fighters can be staged, ready to go, why don't you use the rest of the runway to just takeoff on? No delays, waiting for other aircraft to land or takeoff? I suppose in an actual emergency the fighters would get priority, but still, they have to taxi all the way out to the closest departure end. They were sitting on a runway, why not keep it clear and just use that? Runway 12/30 is usually the crosswind runway around here, given our prevailing winds are almost always east-west due to the location of the airport at the end of a valley, alongside the water. Most people around here even call it " the crosswind runway " instead of 12/30 as it is rarely used except in very strong north/south winds, which is very infrequent.

I doubt the CF-188 has any serious concern with anything but the strongest of tailwinds when taking off. I suppose its safer to avoid, but given the rest of the risk management that they accept and deal with as part of their job, I doubt a little tailwind bothers them all that much.

The hangars themselves are pretty neat.

They look to be brand-new, and took them a couple days to set up out on the runway. They are entirely portable, have their own electrical system inside, and open up on both the front and back sides. I imagine this would be handy for a temporary fighter base, as you could open both ends up and start up the jet right inside the hangar and pull out and take off without the delay of being towed out. I suppose you could pull in the same way as well. I never did see them do that though, it was always in and out with the tug and tow bar.

They also set up a pretty elaborate perimiter fence of concertina wire, and had armed gaurds out there as well.

Helio Courier

2010-03-04T10:58:00.000-08:00

Saw an open hangar the other day and this thing sitting inside.

I remember seeing these things in the movie " Air America ", but I seem to remember them as being tail draggers.

The pilot was getting ready to take it up flying so I had the chance to chat with him for a few minutes.

This guy has The. Coolest. Job. Ever.

Basically, he works for a major US broadcasting company, and they pay him to fly this aircraft around filming sports events. He does a lot of US Football and of course, they sent him up here to cover the Winter Olympics.

There is a camera operator who sits in the back, working the expensive camera mounted under the left wing.

It was kind of incongruous, seeing all the fancy A-Star helicopters, with ball-turret camera mounts hanging off the front and stuffed with so much high-tech gear that some of the seats had to be removed...and then this guy....

Don't get me wrong, I love it. I think this is a brilliant solution to the problem and most likely extremely cost effective compared to the heli-cam operators.

He also burns AvGas, as this is a piston engine aircraft. From what I saw, he was one of maybe a very small handful of people at YVR burning AvGas during the Olympics. The fuel supplier that provided him with fuel could have easily just given him the keys to the their AvGas truck, the only time I saw it move was to come out and fuel this bird.

Oh, and he can get 10 hours endurance!!! Which he needs on occasion as he has to reposition this aircraft all over the US. At approx 100 Kts, its going to take a while to get across the country!

While they were fueling, I also noticed that he would leave one of the four tanks empty, on the side that had the camera mounted under the wing. I assumed this was to balance out the weight of the camera apparatus.

The coolest thing though that caught my eye was the fact that he has retractable leading-edge slats.

Leading edge slats are a high-lift device, used for changing the shape of the wing to make it more efficient at low speeds.

Most large airliners have them. On take-off or landing, they will be extended, along with the trailing-edge flaps, to change the shape of the wing. On takeoff and after accelerating, the flaps and slats are retracted to make the wing more efficient at higher speeds.

The Helio however, has no use for massive hydraulic systems to operate the slats, so they came up with an ingenious solution.

The slats are basically mounted on sliding rails. When the aircraft is standing still, gravity causes them to fall " out " and be extended. Once the aircraft is moving, and operating in the low-speed area ( where the slats are required ), gravity and the relatively low force of the air hitting them keeps them extended.

If the aircraft accelerates and is no longer operating at " low " speeds, then the slats are no longer required and are in fact hindering further acceleration. The higher air-flow hitting the wing at higher airspeeds however, pushes them up against the leading edge of the wing and holds them up in the retracted position!

I pushed them with my hand and they move very easily, say dishwasher-drawer type of force required.

Sorry, I think that is so awesome. I love a simple engineering solution.

According to the pilot, the retraction / extension speed for the slats is actually the same as the stalling speed for the aircraft.

So yeah, flying a cool aircraft, down low, by hand, over sporting events, all over the US and Canada.

It was just him and the camera operator as well, no support staff or management types hanging around.

Awesome.

I didn't ask, but I imagine he gets a serious amount of flying hours as well.

Handicapped Parking

2010-03-04T01:04:00.000-08:00

Saw this happen the other day and had the camera handy to take a couple pics.

A dash-8 sitting on one of the taxi-ways for a long time, with other departing aircraft being routed around it for quite some time. Finally, the dash shuts down both engines and some buses and airport authority vehicles come out to meet it.

Passengers offloaded onto the buses on the taxiway and eventually, the aircraft was towed away.

We were actually using my camera as binoculars it has a pretty good optical zoom, to try and figure out what was going on.

Originally we thought the nose-gear was twisted 90 degrees off centre. There is a nose-wheel steering disconnect on the exterior of the dash-8's nose that you have to pull out when towing it. One theory was that they had forgotten to reconnect, or it failed mid-taxi, causing the nose wheel to suddenly lose directional control.

When we zoomed in with the camera it became obvious this was not the problem.

We spent a few minutes trying to come up with a theory that would fit having to shut down and offload your passengers in the middle of the taxiway and hold up all kinds of operations, instead of simply taxiing back the gate.

This post was actually going to just repeat the same questions we were asking, till I realized I could probably find out.

Checking the photo-file properties I got a date that I took the photo. Using the aircraft type, location and date, I searched the CADORS database and bingo.

Two blown Main Landing Gear tires.

( none of us guessed this.. )

Cadors Number: 2010P0201
Reporting Region: Pacific
Occurrence Information
Occurrence Type: Incident
Occurrence Date: 2010-02-14
Occurrence Time: 2110 Z
Day Or Night: day-time
Fatalities: 0
Injuries: 0
Canadian Aerodrome ID: CYVR
Aerodrome Name: Vancouver Intl
Occurrence Location: Vancouver Intl (CYVR)
Province: British Columbia
Country: CANADA
World Area: North America
Reported By: NAV CANADA
AOR Number: 116196-V1
TSB Class Of Investigation: 5
TSB Occurrence No: A10P0044
Aircraft Information
Flight #: JZA180
Aircraft Category: Aeroplane
Country of Registration: CANADA
Make: DEHAVILLAND - CAN
Model: DHC 8 301
Year Built: 1989
Amateur Built: No
Engine Make: PRATT & WHITNEY-CAN
Engine Model: PW123
Engine Type: Turbo prop
Gear Type:
Phase of Flight: Taxi
Damage: No Damage
Owner: JAZZ AIR LP - AIR CANADA JAZZ
Operator: AIR CANADA JAZZ (5002)
Operator Type: Commercial
Event Information
Aerodrome or runway shutdown
Blown tire/wheel failure
Detail Information
User Name: Samson, Donna
Date: 2010-02-15
Further Action Required: No
O.P.I.: Maintenance & Manufacturing
Narrative: An Air Canada Jazz Dehavilland DH8C operating Flight JZA180, IFR Vancouver to Kamloops, experienced blown tires while taxiing for departure (runway 26L). Taxiway Delta was blocked and as a result up to 5 departing aircraft experienced up to 10 minute delays.
User Name: Samson, Donna
Date: 2010-03-02
Further Action Required: Yes
O.P.I.: Maintenance & Manufacturing
Narrative: UPDATE / Add Info from TSB: A10P0044 - The Air Canada (Jazz) DHC-8-300 aircraft (C-GETA), operating as JZA180, was taxiing for Runway 26L at Vancouver for a flight to Kamloops. The aircraft experienced two blown tires on the right main gear and became immobilized on Taxiway D. Maintenance replaced the # 3 and # 4 right main wheel assemblies. The failed wheel assemblies are being examined by company maintenance in Calgary and TSB will be advised of findings.

In Canada, the Civil Aviation Daily Occurrence Reporting System ( CADORS ) is a great way for NavCanada and other agencies to quickly disseminate information about a safety or regulatory issue without waiting for drawn-out reports, committee's, meetings or royal commissions.

If you do something wrong while practicing Aviation in Canada and someone saw you, chances are you will be the subject of a CADORS.

A CADORS doesnt neccasarily mean there will be any enforcement action. You may not even know that a CADORS about you even exists, unless your friends find it, and post it up on the bulletin board....

Nekko Chan.

2010-03-04T00:16:00.000-08:00

Well, we had a death in the family recently.

My little Kitty, Nekko-Chan has gone to the great scratching post in the sky.

A few weeks ago, she simply stopped eating.

A few days went by before we both noticed it, and then we waited for another couple of days, trying to entice her to eat. We changed her food, bought her her favorite treats. Tried keeping the dog well and truly segregated from her. Tried moving her food, her litter, her toys and blankets to different places, with no luck.

Eventually, had to take her to the Vet to find out what was going on.

She didn't seem to be in any discomfort, just a little lazier than usual ( this is a cat, its hard to tell when they are being lazy-er ). The vet couldn't do much, as our car is not really very friendly. In fact, she is kind of mean.

I don't mean it in a bad way, its just that she wasn't much of a touchy-feely-come-pet-me kind of cat. She liked new people to the house, and would even deign to let guests pet her on occasion. Making TLW and I look like fools after we would warn people not to try and pet our cat and then she comes over and rubs up on their leg and purrs.

She was a rescue-cat and I remember the night we went and picked her up from a no-kill shelter run out of a woman's home that TLW had come across.

All the other animals were running loose in the house, the yard, the neighborhood, even. When we arrived to pick up Nekko though, the woman had to go and get her from a seperate area of the house. She told us at the time that it was because Nekko was a little shy around the other animals. I'm sorry, but that was a bold-faced lie. Nekko was probably making the abused pit-bulls cower and wet themselves, necessitating a little time in solitary.

We were given her in a box and we drove straight home. She sat so still in the box and without the usual fussing or meowing that cats in cars will do, that we thought she had died of fright.

We got her home and let out and she curled up in our laps and was very docile for the first couple days. Then, once the shock of the change in surroundings wore off, her regulalr perosnailty came back.

Her name, Nekko, means " Cat " in Japanese.

In Japan, " Chan " is sometimes added to girls names in an affectionate form. Sort of similar to Miss or Missy. Often, the fist name will be truncated and "chan" added on as an affectionate name for a young girl. Julia might become Ju-Chan, Tomoko would be tomo-chan, etc.

She was our Nekko-chan.

You could pet her, if she willed it, for a few strokes. The top of her head only, maybe one or two down the cheek. Touch her tail, her tummy, her back or her sides and she was going to draw blood.

I'm not even kidding. She'd give you a warning growl if you were lucky, but if you ignored that, the next one was a full-claws swipe. I've had grumpy cats before and the worst was a hiss and a swat with claws retracted, to let you knwo they were unhappy, but generally still acknowledging that you as the human were still the alpha.

Not so much with Nekko. She knew very little fear.

Both TLW and I had a couple instances over the years where we were attacked by her. Both times, we would be sitting down, watching TV and she would come full-tilt across the room, out of the blue, and hissing and spitting, take a few swipes at you before racing away. TLW got it in the head/hair once and and we both got it in the ankles as well. Its more than a little unnerving, believe me. That was a few years ago though, whatever we were doing that pissed her off so much, apparently we've stopped doing it.

In any case, the Vet tried examining her and was met with the Claws of Doom and her best Death-Howl. He wouldn t even touch her and asked me if I could hold her for him to examine. I laughed and told him "No.", not without those heavy duty falcon handling type gloves on. Even then, she was extremely uncooperative, to the point where sedating her and keeping her overnight for blood tests was the only option.

One day and a large sum of money later, we brought her home, with the bad news. He thought she might have a fatal, incurable disease. He gave us some antibiotics in the hopes he was wrong and that she might get her appetitie back, but no luck.

A few days later, she was on her last legs. She was practically falling down out of exhaustion and dehydration. One last trip to the vet and now she's gone.

She was not an easy cat to love, but we loved her.

Title.

2010-03-03T23:37:00.000-08:00

Wow, so much has happened in the past few weeks. I don't even know where to begin.

In fact, I've been unable to properly string together a post in almost a week of trying. Theres three or four half-baked entries loitering in my edit-bin. Victims of me getting started and running off foaming at the mouth and trying to tell fifteen stories at once.

I'm going to try a new tack, as my usual 8-page run-on rambling entries are actually starting to intimidate me. I feel bad for you, having to read them..

I'll try to post a little more often and a little more on-task. It's hard though , when you have eight billion stories trying to bust out.

I'm thinking I might try and pre-bake a few entries and then go in and " release " them on a little more regular basis. When I get the urge to sit down and churn out some words, I have no problem spitting out five or six pages of drivel. So, instead of sticking one title at the top, I'll split it into six different entries. We'll see how it goes..

First big piece of news..... We're having a baby! Yup, The Lovely Wife is pregnant, three months pregnant to be precise. We've been trying for a while and things finally clicked just before Christmas.

This is one of my younger brothers and his baby. That's me holding Joel and apparently channeling Salman Rushdie.

Excited, Terrified, Nervous, Busting-out happy. I'm trying not to dwell too much on it, as I know there are going to be some major changes coming up, for both of us and the direction of our lives. But I think it's going to be one of those things better handled as-they-come and not to get too worried about trying to wrap a master-plan around everything.

Still looking for flying work, or any other new challenge on Aviation that scratches the itch.

Not that I've given up on finding a flying job, but the reality of my situation, my qualifications, the aviation industry in general, the industry in Vancouver in specific and the economy overall, dictates that I might need to focus on finding something that will build my skills and experience, and at the same time allow me to earn a living.

Since I know that chances are I will be here in Vancouver for at least the next year, I've started looking into a couple new directions.

- Flight Dispatching
Something I've found interesting in the past and would definitely challenge me on a whole new level. Not that my current job isn't satisfying or challenging to a degree, but the level of new challenges and learning on a daily basis are significantly lower now that I have a bit of experience.

- Flight Instructing
This one requires some funding to get an instructors rating, and no guarantee that I will find instructing work at the end of it. I think I would be good at it, given my previous " teaching " experience in Japan, and of course my passion for the subject at hand.

- Para-dropping or other part-time work
I suspect the opportunities here are a little limited, but if I could find something part-time, that would allow me even just enough flying to allow me to keep my skills current, I could tough out a year on the ground a little easier.

haha, there I go off into the wild blue babble-yonder.... I said I would keep it short and on-task....and now it's nothing of the sort...

I'll have a few entries worth of photos and stories about the Olympics, so I'm not going to go too far into them right now. I'm still awaiting the O'Hangover to clear before I can tell if people are calling the games a success or if my prediction of a flop was accurate. I suspect I may have been slightly off....I was surprised, both pleasantly and unpleasantly on more than one aspect of the festivities...

This wasn't the Olympics, but rather the ferry lineup sometime in the last couple years. I thought his performance worthy of note.

Winter Olympics 2010

2010-01-21T00:38:00.000-08:00

So, the Winter Olympics are coming to Vancouver. Less than 30 days to go till opening ceremonies and finally things are starting to happen.

I lamented a few weeks ago to someone that I found it strange that there seemed to be a complete lack of fanfare or boosterism going on, with the games rapidly approaching.

I read an article the other day that explains this is their plan. Apparently, they are saving all the PR work for the last couple of weeks before the opening ceremonies. Makes sense in a way, I guess. For the last two years all we have heard about was the negative aspects, the traffic, road closures, construction projects, security and all manner of doomsday scenario's on how we just aren't going to be able to handle it. So, save all the good news for the last couple of weeks and try to put a smile on every ones face when the world shows up.

Unfortunately, they either haven't applied the proper amount of sunshine, or they are directing it to the wrong anatomical area, but I am not really looking forward to the whole thing. I am in a way, I guess, but it's more morbid curiosity than anything else..

My own personal prediction ( you heard it here first folks ), is that these games are going to be a flop. In my view, the best we can hope for at this point is a fizzle. Unremarkable, would be best case in my opinion. My fear though, is that we are going to fail... There seems to be an all-pervading theme of " don't worry, its under control, you'll be told what you need to know when you need to know it. Stop asking questions. "

Which streets are closing? When and for how long? Which buses, skytrains are going to be cancelled / detoured / increased? Are roads to the airport being check-pointed with CATSA minions demanding that I put apple juice in a baggie before going to work? If I walk out of the " secure area " and go outside for a minute, will I be able to get back air-side without going through screening?

And now, how the heck are we going to have alpine events on the local mountains, when there is no snow? A week or so ago we had a " Pineapple Express ". A nice low pressure system that comes from the southwest ( Hawaii ) and brings lots of moisture and well-above freezing temperatures. Like double digits above zero. If its 12 on the ground, 3000 feet above on the local hills, its only around 6 degrees or so. And Raining. Really, Really, Raining.

They announced it on the news yesterday. Warmest January in recorded history.

I saw a picture of one of the local ski hills, the snow base is almost gone and big muddy, bare patches are showing.

We had a meeting the other day at work and went over our operations plans for the event. This is definitely going to be one to remember. So much of our operation has changed and we have less than 10 days to get used to it and smooth out the wrinkles before things start really happening.

We've also got sleeping quarters for the staff, both the local staff and the staff from other locations that are being called in to help out. The thinking is that on the peak days, at least, we will most likely be working 16+ hour shifts and going home to simply turn around and come back less than 8 hours later will not be very efficient.

The two peak periods we are expecting are the arrival and departure crushes. Prior to the official opening ceremonies on Feb 12, all manner of aircraft are scheduled to arrive. We've got everything from smaller business jets to full size airliners bringing in TV production crews, Military personnel, Athletes, foreign dignitaries and of course, the super-rich.

The arrival crush is the " easier " of the two, as most of the people will be arriving kind of staggered, over a three day period. The departure one will be the real deal. As soon as the Olympics are over, everyone wants out. Now.

But, we've got a good crew here. Lots of guys with 15+ years of experience. Even some who took part in the Calgary 1988 Winter Olympics.

Hmm. One sec, google-break.

Wow. it WAS in 1988. 22 years ago. holy crap.

Security is tight, to say the least. I can't really get into it on here ( or I'd have to kill you, and that would suck. ), but trust me, its tight.

Lots of debate about whether its necessary or not, economically feasible or not, etc.

One thing to keep in mind, in regards to the military participation, economically at least, its not very costly at all. Its a great training exercise, with all kinds of real-world problems and challenges that a training scenario simply couldn't come up with. If they weren't practicing and burning fuel here, they'd be doing it anyway in Cold Lake, in Borden, in Shearwater.

Theres a couple of cruise ships parked in the harbour, filled with cops and military personnel. Best of all, they are also filled with the cruise ships regular staff as well. That's right, 24/7 buffet, swimming pool, karaoke, shuffleboard. Tough bivouac!

I've been picking up a little bit of part-time work here and there helping out a local company detailing aircraft. I got an introduction to " Bright Work " the other day.

Any of the shiny bits on a jet, are actually polished aluminum in most cases. It is usually associated with a heated surface, it being where the anti-icing systems that use very hot air from the engines direct the heat to keep ice from forming. The heat is distributed through pipes which have holes in them, running inside the leading edges of the wings, stabilizers and engine inlets. The pipes vary in diameter to keep the pressure uniform throughout its length.

The polished aluminum bits are subject to a lot of stress, both heat, corrosion and friction. Engine inlets and the leading edges of wings and stabilizers are the ones most impacted by bugs, ice, hail, towing crews and errant baggage carts.

There is also the important aspect of keeping a smooth surface, as these areas are the ones most affected by the skin friction drag caused by the meeting of air and airplane. It has been proven that the smoother the surface, the greater its efficiency, through reduction of drag. Something as rough as your average sandpaper on the surface of the wing, for example, might reduce the lift production of the wing by as much as 40%. That's a lot.

So, the polished aluminum bits get polished a lot. You also don't want corrosion getting a foothold in the metal either, so the polishing actually takes off a little bit of the surface in order to remove any oxidation that has started.

Bottom line. A lot of work. Hard work, manual polishing, elbow-grease, awkward places, repetitive work.

We had a report the other day of someone " Twittering " aircraft arrival details on their twitter-page? ( I have no idea how twitter works, so play along.. ) and they caught the attention of the airport authority. Apparently they figure its an employee of one of the FBO's and they are trying to figure out who it is...

With that in light, and the fact that I am going to be pretty busy for the next few weeks, I doubt there will be many updates from me.

Pictures of visiting aircraft are verboten at any time, and there is no shortage of all kinds of security spooks looking to justify their cruise-ship per Diem that I can't really say or post much without risking a grey area....

N'aughties

2010-01-09T11:16:00.000-08:00

I saw the term " Naughties " used the other day to refer to the decade of 2000 - 2009. I presume it to be referring to " aught " as a term referring to 01-09, as " teens " are used in referring to numbers 10-19.

I'm not sure if I like the term, but it does seem a little appropriate given the nature of some of the decadence and excess in the last ten years or so, and the fact that we seem to be paying for it now....

Anyhow, onward, upward. Things will be what they will be, not much sense in dwelling on things...

Got the itch to go flying the other day, and finally decided I better do some scratching. Its been a few months since I've had the controls of an aircraft. The holiday season was pretty good to us financially, with myself getting a nice little cheque pre-christmas for some retro pay due for an old pay increase that got missed, a signing bonus on our new union contract and another healthy pay increase for Jan 01 under the new contract.

Most of the extra money went to paying bills, but I managed to get my hands on 135 bucks to go and rent an ultralight from the local ultralight strip and go for a boot.

I could have spent a couple more bucks and rented a 172 or a 152, but the ultralight place had just added a couple new planes to the fleet and I wanted to give one a try. I went for a flight in one a year or so ago and didn't really care too much for it. It felt really squirrelly and difficult to fly a steady course or get the aircraft trimmed out properly. The aircraft I took up this time though was awesome!

It was a little Ukrainian made job ( insert appropriate ukie joke here ), and the name escapes me, but I promise to find out and post it.

The strip is a little grass ( West Coast winter, read: Mud ) strip of 1200-1500 feet or so and a little bumpy.

I went up with one of their instructors, as I'd never rented from them before and a check-out was in order before they will let me loose on just my say-so of my awesome pilot-y type skills.

A neat feature of the plane, it had a Ballistic Recovery System! This is a parachute, for the plane! According to the owner, this is a big wife-seller on the poeple who come in with the typical cocked eyebrow when hubby says he is going to try flight training in an ultralight. If you get in serious trouble, as a last resort, you can pull the handle and a chute will fire out the top of the plane, and bring it to a controlled vertical descent. I'm told most of these systems allow for landing at vertical velocities equivalent to a ten-foot drop. Enough to rattle your fillings to be sure, and bend the airplane without doubt, but possibly a better outcome than other possibilities, depending on the scenario.

I've also heard that these systems are getting a little bit of a bad rap, given their activation in scenarios where it wasn't at last-resort yet and cooler heads didn't prevail. Hard to say, but its nice to have one more tool as a backup.

We ended up leaving fairly late in the day, with our legal daylight dwindling and twilight encroaching. We were legal, but its not hard to be in legal " day " and still have it quite dark out.

Over to one of the local airports for some touch and go's, got to practice my slips and slipping turns as I had a tough time judging power settings for my approach with an aircraft I wasnt familiar with. I like slipping too, and the goal of the day was to just have some fun.

For those not familiar, a slip is used on approach where you are too high ( didnt take enough power off during the approach, or took it off too late ) and power is fully off. If you lower the nose and " dive " at the runway, you will pick up speed. Excessive speed is not going to help you at all, as you will have to then bleed this speed off over the runway before the aircraft will stop flying and let you land it. You may well get to the runway by diving at it, but you will still land waaaaay down the runway while you " float " along in ground effect trying to get rid of all that extra speed.

So, the slip is used by giving full rudder in one direction ( turning the nose of the plane away from the runway ) and using the ailerons to keep the aircraft pointed towards the runway. This ends up making the aircraft sort of fly sideways, presenting a large section of the fuselage into the relative airflow and creating a large amount of drag. The drag slows the aircraft down considerably, allowing speed to drop. If the speed is dropping, the nose can be lowered towards the runway ( it will actually descend quite quickly without the nose really dropping at all ) and you can then " dive " at it without penalty of increasing your speed. This is a simplified explanation, but the end result is a significant rate of descent without an increase in speed. I love the feeling of a slip properly applied and the bottom dropping out from underneath you.

I've had instructors warn against doing this with nervous passengers as they may not enjoy this sensation...

The trick too is to make sure you have straightened the aircraft out nice and smoothly to transition to a normal ( straight, aligned with the runway ) attitude prior to landing.

After a few circuits, we flew over to the practice area to try out a few upper air maneuvers. This thing stalls at 29 MPH...haha! The indicated airspeed approaching the stall dropped off to almost zero before we felt anything. The stall was really gentle as well, no wing dropping or anything, just a little buffet. I actually waited a bit before I recovered as I didn't think it was fully stalled, but apparently it was.

A little slow flight to see if we could make it " stand still " and then hurry up and get home before it got too dark!

Coming back to the home strip, I let the instructor know that this was all him now.

Way too dark for me to comfortably find an unfamiliar, unlit, dark, muddy, short, strip. I told him later that had that been just me in the plane, he would have been getting a phone call from the field where we had done the touch and go's at, because thats where I would have left their airplane!

I also wouldn't have left that late, but I asked the instructor before we left if he was comfortable departing knowing what the light conditions would be like when we returned and he seemed quite confident.

When we called in on the Aerodrome Traffic Frquency ( ATF ), to announce our impending arrival and intentions, one of the other owners on the ground asked us if we wanted a car or two placed along the runway to light things up. We decided to have a look-see first and ended up seeing the strip nicely. It was neat too to see the casual and helpful nature of everyone out there at this strip. Everyone was just out there having fun and watching out for each other. Not a lot of the posturing and too-cool-for-school attitudes that your typical training aerodrome seems to suffer a lot of these days.

The aircraft had tons of power ( relatively, of course ) and it felt very stable in the air. I was quite impressed. It cruised at around 90kts as well, not too shabby!

Comfortable, roomy two-seat cockpit. It even had a " real " throttle setup, which you gripped with your palm on the centre console, instead of the awkwardly placed and goofy-feeling Cessna throttle which is the plunger type, mounted up on the panel. I like to hold the throttle while I fly, and this made it very comfortable, almost like resting your hand on the gear-shift.

One thing I didnt like though, was the combination display for the engine instruments. Everything was digital, with no needles, green arcs, red lines or other visual cues to help with monitoring engine performance. I suppose if I flew this thing on a regular basis, I'd have the nominal values memorized, but its nice to not have to really read the values and simply glance at the needle and the red line to make sure things are doing what they are supposed to be doing.

I understand though that with ultralights, there are quite a few compromises that have to be made in non-critical areas to keep the weight down.

Here's a picture showing a cessna throttle ( the black knob ).

Also visible is my nephews creation which I promised him I would take with me when I go flying. I sent him a couple pictures on one flight, and I need to remind myself to send him some soon so he is reassured that it still goes with me to help land the plane!

It didn't hurt that the aircraft has less than a hundred hours on it as well. Most of the Cessnas I'm used to flying had in excess of 5000 hours...

I'm looking forward to going back to scratch the itch and am wondering what the local instructing employment scene is like for the ultralight guys...

Had a Canadian Forces Cormorant helicopter visit us the other day. On a training exercise and lunch break. I love how these guys " land " on the runway and then taxi over. Its always a little weird to see a helicopter cruising down the taxi way instead of landing directly on the pads. We actually had quite a few do that when we had all that fog last week.

I'm assuming that helicopters would follow the same instrument approach procedures to a runway and then " circle to land " at their intended pad once the airport environment is in sight?

In the case of the fog, I presume they followed the ILS all the way down and since the airport environment wasn't visible, most likely runway lighting only, they had to land on the runway and taxi off?

Happy Holidays!

2009-12-28T12:21:00.000-08:00

Ok, so first of all, Happy Holidays to everyone!

It's been a fairly busy couple of weeks. Lots of visiting with relatives, dinners out, dinners in, saw a movie, worked a horrific amount of overtime and enjoyed the christmas non-bustle that is my job at this time of year.

As far as dinners went, I managed ( with my moms help ) to cook my first Turkey. As in first Turkey ever. Had a couple of good tips from some friends ( Who DOESNT have a good turkey tip?? ) and it turned out pretty damn good.

I'll pass on the three things that I think contributed to its success;

1.) A half-a-stick of provencal butter tucked under each wing, with the wing skewered up onto the body to hold it in place while it melted. Not sure of the placement of the butter really did all that much, considering how fast it melted, but the every-30-minutes basting of the provencal butter did good things, directly proportional to the yumminess.

2.) Got a fresh bird from the local butcher, instead of frozen from the supermarket. Also did quite a small bird ( 10 Lbs ), so both may have factored into its turn-out.

3.) On the butchers reccomendation, used a Sausage Stuffing. He provided the ground sausage meat, to which we added bread, celery, seasoning and onions. We cooked the stuffing both inside the bird and outside as well, since we had so much, and both turned out really, really good.

The Lovely Wife also rendered the carcass into a fantastic turkey soup, mmm mm good!

If anyone lives in Vancouver, I highly recommend the good folks over at Farm Town Meats in New Westminster. Lots of good marinated meats and extremely helpful staff and owner.

Also went and saw the movie 2012. Definitely wanted to see that on the big screen, before it left the theatres.

I didn't realize it, but they had actually filmed a couple of scenes at our FBO last spring. I noticed one of our tugs as well as a shot inside one of our hangars. I wasn't expecting it, so it was kind of neat to see.

We actually get quite a lot of filming, hangar, ramp and aircraft exterior shots are very commonly done at our place.

The Lovely Wife used to work at a film production outfit and I picked up a good tip from her. This is my Christmas gift to anyone reading along;

As a production crew is generally a large group of sub-contractors brought together, a lot of the people don't know each other. Each contractor has their role and they frequently work the same projects as others, but there is always new faces and people you don't know, wandering around, looking like they belong there.

Film projects also work crazy hours on a regular basis. All the work in setting up a location, can mean that they are very loathe to shut it down after 8, 10, 12 hours if they haven't completed the shot yet.

Enter the caterer.

Catering company is hired to feed all the contractors, actors and production crew, so that no one is running off to get Mickey D's, or taking ill-timed lunch breaks.

Generally Craft Services ( Catering ) will have a snack tent/trailer set up for anyone to grab a quick bite of something, and then a proper lunch wagon / tent / trailer set up to feed everyone full meals at mealtimes. All of this is free for all the members of the crew. There is no cash register, and the caterer gets paid a set amount for being there.

Add the random-contractor factor to the caterer-gets-paid-no-matter-who-gets-fed and you have the perfect recipe for FREE FOOD!

Next time you see a movie set ( lots of big trailers, random tents, orange cones, people with hi-vis vests and headsets ), make yourself look like you belong there, and bon appetit!

I highly recommend an orange safety vest, walkie talkie, strange costume or even an overly-engrossing blackberry to round out your disguise of being one-of-the-guys as you dig in to the free nosh.

I've also started my post-Christmas countdown clock to writing the INRAT ( Instrument rating written exam ). Now that the holidays are over, I'd like to get my studying done on or before the closing ceremonies of the winter Olympics.

I would have liked to have a full 60 days of part-time, evening and weekend study time to get ready, but with the Olympics approaching, I may not get as much time as I'd like. I'm going to try anyways, but I might end up pushing things back a little if the Olympics are half as crazy at work as we are expecting.

I've had a few months to read through a few good books to give me a good overview of IFR flying, and am now moving into studying the regulations parts of it in a little more of an organized fashion.

First stop is to get to know the CAP GEN. The CAP GEN is a little booklet, technically the Canada Air Pilot Instrument Procedures General Pages.

NavCanada publishes all of the charts in Canada for Aviation. The Canada Air Pilot ( CAP ) series is the books of approach plates for each region. Theres seven regions in total in Canada, and the CAP1, CAP2, etc, will have all of the instrument approach procedures for all airports within that region that have a published instrument approach.

On top of the 7 CAP's, there is also the CAP GEN, which is the basic IFR flying rules. Its a tiny little thing, about 40 pages total. It kinds of looks more like a little brochure or pamphlet, rather then the definitive set of current instrument flying procedures for an entire country, buth there it is.

Everyone I've talked to and all the books I've read so far, have all said the same thing.

Know the CAP GEN cold, forwards and backwards.

40 pages eh? How hard could it be?

Except, its basically excerpts from the Canadian Air Regulations ( CARs ) and is written in slightly simplified legalese.

You can take any given sentence in this book and you notice right away the very conspicuous use of legalese. Lots of AND, OR, UNLESS, SUBJECT TO, SHALL, WILL, SUBSECTION X, kind of stuff.

First section I am working on is dealing with Landing, Takeoff and Approach Minima. Very appropriately too, we've had some very intense fog over the last week or so. I'm getting to know a lot about RVR, Cat II and Low Visibility procedures, and thats just looking out the window...

A couple more things from my job, this is some of the airplane-moving equipment that we use. These two machines are made by a company called Lektro. There is a smaller one, we call " The Small One " and a larger, lower one, we usually call " The Lowboy ".

These machines are used to move aircraft around by lifting the nosewheel off the ground and crsdling it in the front " bucket ". This is MUCH easier than attaching a tow-bar and towing / pushing the aircraft.

As the nose-wheel is off the ground, the steering is done by the steering wheels of the Lektro itself. When you attach a tow bar to the nosewheel, there are two sets of steering wheels in play, both the tugs steering, as well as the aircrafts nosewheel.

Imagine hooking two Little Red Wagons together by attaching the handle of one to the back of the other. Pulling them forward is nice and easy.

Now push them backwards.... too many steering points. Thats what towing with a tow bar is like.

I'm only now getting comfortable using the tow bar, but luckily, we don't have to use it very often.

Some aicraft, by their design, or low clearance underneath, are not suited to " scooping " with the Lektro.

The one thing you have to be careful with though is the turning limits that the nose wheel is rated for. Most aircraft are not designed to have the nosewheel turn more than 30-45 degrees. Many aircraft can be damaged pretty severely if you try to turn it past its limits, which the Lektro will allow you to do very easily.

Some aircraft have detachable " scissors " on the nose wheel as well. The scissors connect the bottom section of the gear to the steering apparatus above the oleo ( shock absorber ). With the scissors connected, you turn the wheel and the whole steering assembly turns, including any control rods/cables/wizards inside the airplane. With the scissors connected, you have specific turning limits, if you disconnect them though, it lets the wheel rotate freely around the oleo and will often give you 360 degrees of turning capability, ie free castoring.

With the Lowboy, and a free castoring nose wheel, you can actually scoop the front wheel of the aircraft from underneath that aircraft itself and " push " it forward instead of towing. handy for tight squeezes into the hanger. The lowboy is also designed to allow us to drive under aircraft and their wings while in the hangar. Usually the driver ends up being the highest point on the vehicle. resulting in a little bit of wing-limbo while maneuvering around inside a packed hangar.

This is a shot of the software we use for keeping track of aircraft inbound to us. It will actually show us all flights in the air in North America and New Zealand, that are on IFR flight plans and in radar contact. ( Why it shows us NZ is a mystery to me... )

We usually set it to filter out all flights except those destined for Vancouver. This way, we can keep track of the progress of aircraft that have told us are coming, and we can also spot those that might be headed our way and haven't got around to telling us yet. We can also use it to track a specific aircraft, if we know the registration, and it will tell us where in the world it is located, in flight or last-known landing. This can be usefull if an aircraft hasnt arrived as scheduled, we can find out where it went, in case they changed plans and didnt tell us, or the aircraft never even left its origin and the flight was cancelled.

It will show us the Aircraft Registration, Altitude, Speed, Origin and Destination on the screen, and we can look up other details through the menus as well.

Often someone will recognize a registration that we have seen before and we will be prepared for their arrival, even if they haven't called in. Other times, we see aircraft that no one has seen, or are scheduled and we know to keep our eyes and ears peeled as they taxi in, in case they decide to pull onto our ramp.

Scheduled airline flights will show the airline code and flight number instead of a registration.

This is one of our fixed-GPU's. A Ground Power Unit that we can roll out to an aircraft and plug in, providing DC power. We also have portable ones, powered by a diesel generator.

Some aircraft were designed, or have acquired weak battery / electrical systems where starting their engines with battery power alone is taxing. We plug in the GPU and the initial start is done under power provided by a Hydro Dam somewhere out in the Kootenays. Once the first engine is running, they will often get us to disconnect the GPU as the running engine can supply enough power to start the other engine, or there is a system for using the bleed air off the running engine to spin up the fan on the other engine for the start.

When we do a GPU start, one of the guys will stand by the GPU at the connection point to the aircraft, the other marshaller will stand in front, in eye contact with the pilot.

the pilot will signal when he is ready to start each engine, and the marhsller will indicate back, with hand signals, that the area behind is clear and they are OK to go ahead with engine start.

Once one or both the engines are started, there will be another signal by the pilot, indicating we can disconnect the GPU.

TRhe marshaller will give another signal to the guy in the back, to shut off the power on the GPU and then disconnect it from the aircraft. If you disconnect the GPU before turning it off, you could, in theory, create a spark or power spike. The marshaller up front will then make sure the pilot doesnt try to leave, until the guy in the back has been able to fold up the GPU cord, and pull it out of the way. Once the GPU is clear, the pilot is usually given the all-clear so they can leave as soon as they are ready.

I've seen it happen twice in the last three years, where the pilot starts up the engines, forgets he has the GPU connected and tried to leave. Luckily, the marshaller up front knows the hand signal for indicating this to the pilot. Its basically the same as the one for the signal to connect / disconnect power, except theres a lot more laughing.

Not so funny however, is when the marshaller in the back, is working in very close proximity to a running jet engine and the pilot decides to go without getting an all-clear from the marshaller.

A lot of stuff is happening in the cockpit on start-up, and occasionally you will see a pilot who gets so engrossed, head-down, that they aren't aware of whats going on around them. I've seen aircraft creeping slowly ahead, with the pilots off the brakes and heads down, with the marshaller waving frantically at the tops of their craniums. Or, cockpit distractions done, head pops up, thumb comes up / landing light flashes, signalling they are ready to go and the aircraft is rolling, even before the marshaller has had a chance to look around and confirm to them that the area is clear and they can start moving.

Near where I work, there is a gate that lets the seaplanes cross the road and go down the ramp into the water.

If you're ever in Vancouver, check out Harbour Air's terminal, near the South Terminal and their famous Pub, The Flying Beaver.

I was working at Vancouver Airport, right across the street from this pub, when they built it. It was packed from opening day and to this day seems to be very successful. I drive a lot of visiting pilots and aircrew from our place to their hotel in our courtesy van and it seems like the reputation for this place has traveled pretty far. We get crews from all over the world and many of them have visited it before.

Unfortunately, a lot of them are in town for very short stays, one night or less, and they often lament the fact that they've been there three or four times but never had the chance to enjoy an alcoholic beverage or two due to impending flying... Trust me though, on a nice summer day, there is no better patio to be on with a cold one in hand, than The Beav!

Seaplanes coming and going, and the river, the airport. Its all about location, and this one has it made.

I think this guy realized that trying to hold the mattresses down on the roof with the classic arm out the window was futile. I'm not too sure about his alternative...but it looks like its working.

Night Flying Video

2009-12-21T11:37:00.000-08:00

Ok, I was going through some old pictures and videos to see if I had anything of interest to post, and I found an old one when I was doing my night rating last year.

It was a solo flight, and I managed to balance the camera on the glareshield ( Dash ) and tried to get a video of a Touch and Go, at CYPK, Pitt Meadows airport.

Quality is not so good, and its not very exciting. until the very last..

I put the coals to her to take care of the " Go " part of a touch and go, and the camera fell onto the floor.

It was funny, but at the time, it actually alarmed me for a second and I learned something that day. Had it fell on the floor on my side of the plane, and jammed under the rudder pedals, or the strap snagged on the yoke and then the mixture knob, things could have been different. A little far fetched, but never the less.

The distraction alone, of seeing the camera go flying, was enough to remind me that fooling around in an airplane, even a little..., can have consequences.

I'm considering selling the footage to Fox News, " DEATH PLANE FOOTAGE!!! ".

Might pay for the multi-ifr I am presently coveting.

Oh, I was showing another fueler how to operate the panel on a large aircraft the other day, and we noticed that the switch to turn the power ON/OFF to the panel is labelled " ARM/DISARM.

We were laughing about their choice of words and not simply using ON/OFF.

I'm going to start using ARM/DISARM in my daily vocabulary.

Honey, would you mind disarming the bathroom lights before you come to bed?

Cold Weather and Jet sounds

2009-12-08T10:58:00.000-08:00

Ok, so we had a discussion at work the other day about the sound of jets taking off in the cold weather we've been having.

I've purposefully NOT googled it.

It's pretty amazing these days the amount of information that the internet has to offer, good and bad. I mean, you can pretty much answer ANY question with enough searching on the internet. It's kind of like spending a day downtown on a street corner and posing your question to every person you see. You'll get a lot of answers, some right, some wrong. But, the answer is there if you keep asking.

So, the question is, why do large transport-category jets make a different sound in cold weather than they do in warm?

By cold, I mean just below 0 Celsius.

Other parts of Canada live in this regime for the entire winter, so people there might only notice that difference in the spring and fall when the temp moves above and below zero, but for the rest of the winter it is the "normal" sound to them. To us, its very noticeable.

Its kind of a hissing / whispering noise.

A couple of the theories thrown out there were;

1.) The air, being denser, propagates the sound waves better. The molecules are closer together and thus transmit the sound wave with more efficiency.

2.) The temperature difference between the propelled air behind a jet and the still air it is being propelled through is greater, thus a greater / different sound.

3.) Any temperature below zero means there is some amount of frozen water in the air and the sound waves travel and/or are reflected differently around this solid obstacle.

Some of the discussion points were;

The sound of a jet is due to the difference in speeds of the propelled air meeting the still air behind the engine. The colder air, being denser, changes the dynamic of this meeting of air.

The temperature is only say 10 degrees or less different between that of a day when we don't hear the hissing noise, so it must have something to do with the fact that it is below zero, and not just the temperature differential. We don't hear a difference when the temp changes from say 30 to 10, only when it goes below zero.

If freezing point is a factor, it must have something to do with Ice, either frozen water in the air through which the sound wave is travelling or the sound wave propagation properties of air & water vapour at below-zero temps.

Water vapour, being a gas, can't " freeze ", without sublimating onto sometthing and becoming a solid. So if the day is crystal clear ( as is often the case in cold weather, where there is little in the way of water vapour in the cold air ), then how could " Ice Crystals " affect the sound wave propagation or refraction, if you cant see them in the air?

The question intrigues me, but so does the process of finding the answer.

I mean, if I don't google it, and I ask everyone I know, their brain engages and they start asking other questions. Curiosity gets peaked and they start asking other people for their input and suggestions. Someone offers a theory you hadn't considered and, in some cases, learning occurs. Someone offers a theory that sounds logical, but is in fact, not true. Someone else walks away thinking the problem is solved, but now has an incorrect "solution" in their head, possibly affecting how they view another problem.

But, if I simply go home, google the heck out of it and find the answer, than nothing happens. I might ( or might not ) get the correct answer, my curiosity is slated, and no one's brain engages, mine included.

What will happen in 20 years when the internet has weeded out all the chaff and you never need to ask anyone a question? Everything you want to know is simply answered if you want to know it.

I know, its a weird question.

Maybe I'll just google it.

Oh, the pictures were sent to me a couple of years ago after a severe hail-storm in Edmonton.

This was in the summer.

What you are seeing is not snow, its large quantities of hail. It built up to the point where it clogged sewer drains, flooded roads and actually created " ice floes " in the flooded streets.

Brush with greatness

2009-12-07T10:32:00.000-08:00

Ok, so I finally met someone famous.

I walked out the door of the FBO and there. he. was.

Right there, looking at me.

I couldn't believe it...was it really him?

It can't be.

He looks..much...shorter ...for some reason.

Maybe its not him.

Stop staring.

Jesus, you know what, it is him.

Yup. ran into Captain Sully last night.

No, not the goose-eating-river-landing Sully, THE Captain Sully.

I've been following his blog for the past two years or so, and he finally made his way out to the west coast. Ostensibly to visit his mom, but I suspect he had heard of the fantastic-ness that is our FBO and just had to see for himself what all the buzz was about.

Joking aside, it actually did feel like a celebrity encounter. I have several small Tupperware containers filled with respect for the guy, gained from reading along with his blog, as well as his moderation efforts and postings on a certain Canadian Aviation Interweb Forum / Cage Match Death Ring Bloodsport site.

Imagine my horror as I filled his plane and managed to draw the short straw and get El Vesuvius, the hose with the leaky nozzle, and splattered Jet-A all around the fill port.

Couldn't take any pictures, of course, you're not supposed to harass the celebrities.

Noxious Weed

2009-12-06T10:49:00.000-08:00

Took a trip up north of here the other day, with my mom, up to my brothers place.

He lives in little cabin near a tiny little town ( the pop. less than 100 kind of tiny ).

The company he works for books adventure tourism trips down to Belize and they are based in the weirdest of places, far back in the mountains. It works out really well for all involved though, as most of their business is done either on site down in Belize, or over the phone / internet. The quality of life is drastically improved for all involved up here, by living / working where they do.

The office is in the basement of a small cabin set on a 90 acre property just outside this tiny little town. The upstairs of the cabin is an apartment, where my brother lives.

Sharing the apartment with him are two enormous malamutes. They were rescue dogs and are named Happy ( Hapi ) and Hero ( Hiro ). The assumption is that they were originally owned by a Korean family, but the names translate quite well.

When the property was bought, the original owner had made some cool little improvements as well. One thing was a natural hot-tub / wading pond. Cut into the ground and drained by a pipe to the nearby stream, the pond was made of large rocks set into a hole dug into the ground, making benches to sit on.

You could easily fit a dozen soakers in this pool, but I can't imagine it would be easy to heat the water or keep it clean. Neat idea though.

Their was even an airstrip built on the property as well. Being out of use and maintenance for the last few years though has taken its toll. Theres a few goods ruts running along the "runway " and even cutting across it in a few places. The runway has also been narrowed down to little more than a ATV track, as they're the only ones really using it and the brush is starting to take over elsewhere.

The drive up was spectacular. We've finally had a few days of sunshine here on the Wet Coast, and it looks like we might get a few more too. Very Nice.

I got to take my new wheels out for a shakedown cruise and am happy to report that it did just fine on the highway. The mileage boost was impressive and its quite comfortable even for a few hours at a time, despite it being quite small.

I also got to pay a visit to my old car, which I sold to my brother, almost seven years ago. I have fond memories of this car and was surprised to see it in fairly gfood shape. I knew it had been sitting up on his property, unused for at least a year, maybe even two, so was expecting to see a moss and mold covered hulk lurking in the bushes, but its actually looking pretty much like how I remember it.

It was a good car...but is a bit ( ok, more than a bit ) of a pig on gas. I was considering buying a 1000$ beater to get me through the next year, unfortunately, the gas consumption on this thing would have more than cost the difference between a car loan and this thing.

The only real difference in the car that I can see is a nice dent one of the local kids decided to kick into the back door. I'm surpirsed that it hasnt been picked up by a local though, this would be a perfect war-wagon for a teenager who doenst have to drive / commute long distances. As a parent, I would totally buy my teen something like this. Very safe, ( every car around you is your crumple-zone ) comfortable, and they're not going to be paying it for years when they inevitably wreck the thing in the first two years.

It was a great visit, we spent lots of time just chatting, walking around on the logging roads surrounding the property and just hanging out.

Temperatures definitely a little more winter like up here, I think we even pulled double digits below zero overnight. Scary stuff for a left coaster.

Lots of evidnece of the fight against the Pine Beetle up here. The owners are trying all kinds of things to try and keep their trees from being infected by these things. There were little packets of some kind of bait/poison tacked to a lot of the trees and other trees which had been infected were cut down and had the bark removed to try and quarantine them.

On this freshly cut tree, apparently the Bluish ring about two inches into the tree is a tell-tale sign of this tree's death by pine beetle. I was told that its not the beetle which usually kills the tree, its a single or various infections that get into the now-exposed interior of the tree and eventually kill it.

I don't know too much about the pine beetle thing, but I do remember reading a good article on it, blaming both the environmentalists and the logging groups on using the pine beetle for their own advantage and hamstringing efforts at the fight against it.

The Environmentalists claiming that the logging interests were blowing the whole thing out of proportion in order to get access to stands of lumber that were off limits to them in the past but wereclaiming them to be now " infected " and should be harvested quickly before they were dead and useless to everyone.

The Logging interests claimed the Enviro's were slowing down the fight by this tactic and were hurting them by allowing the beetle to spread and damage timber lots that were due to be logged eventually, but would be long-dead by the time they were ready.

It kind of reminds me of Global Warming. On one side you have the Drama of the mainstream media, and on the other, you get the immediate reaction of a huge chunk of people who will write off anything the media says as histrionics.

One day the sky will fall and we'll be too busy out in the backyard with our TV's turned off.

On the drive up, we noticed that they had significantly improved the old mining museuem. It used to look like something out of a springsteen steel-town video, with broken windows and rust streaked siding. Now, it looks like a brand new mine. I've heard stories about some of the local pollution that the area has suffered around it though, as a result of the gold and copper mining methods of yesteryear.

One story I read, was that the old tailings pond, full of arsenic and mercury was wiped out, along with the company town one night on a flash flood. All that pollution went straight out into the sound.

Back in the day, gold mining was particularly toxic, with the extensive use of mercury to extract gold. The way I remember it, Mercury is one of the only metals that will amalgamate with gold. So, Gold that was mixed with other heavy materials, black sand, quartz, etc, would be ground up as fine as possible and then dumped into a large quantity of mercury. The Mercury would amalgamate with the gold, essentially dissolving it into the mercury. The other materials would not amalgamate and be left behind.

The mercury is then cooked off, leaving only pure gold behind. Not sure of this method is still in use, but you can imagine the dangers of cooking mercury.. let alone the residual mercury left behind in the waste material after the gold has been amalgamated.

Old miners used to use this on a small scale even, the mercury and gold amalgam would be poured into a hollowed out potato, bound with foil/wire and then cooked in a campfire, leaving your gold in the middle of the potato.

Got called into work early the other day, to help out with fueling a special visitor. It ended up not needing my truck, as the first truck was able to fill its requested fuel order, but we're due to see them a few more times before long, so I'm hoping to get the nod again to go and poke around up close to this thing. Its Canada's newest addition, the C-17 Globemaster. More accurately, its the CC-177.

Canada adds a "C" to the original designations and usually modifies the numerical value as well.

The "C" in this case means, Cargo. Lots of Cargo.

An "F-18" becomes a " CF-188 " in Canada.

C = Canada
F = Fighter
188 = 18 + something else to make it unique to us, and not just a copy of the US designation.

A Bell 412 becomes a CH-146 for us;

C = Canada
H = Helicpoter
146 = any value but 412.

Airplane geek stuff over, you can unglaze.

Oooh, forgot to mention the takeoff roll....

We watched it leave, empty, other than a substantial fuel load, and I think they put on a bit of a show. This thing was airborne in, by our calculations, less than 2000'. If anyone is familiar with YVR, it left on 26L and was airborne by Bravo.

Yeah.

Pretty impressive for an aircraft of its size!

November already

2009-11-21T02:45:00.000-08:00

Wow, November already.

I've had a fairly busy last couple of months. A few notable stories to share.

Three weeks ago, I was in a car accident. I was turning off my street and onto a busier street and managed to misjudge my turn so badly that I ended up sticking well out into the outside lane.

The outside lane happened to be full of same-direction traffic and with my luck, I happened to encroach onto the path of a tractor trailer.

Luckily, I guess, my encroachment into his lane was in the form of the front end of my car turning underneath his trailer as he went by. I managed to catch a glimpse of the side of his trailer a few inches from my driver side window and instantly realized that this put the hood of my little car underneath the trailer... The back wheels impacted me quite smartly on my drivers side front wheel, fender and hood. He was probably going about 50 km/h and the impact threw the front end of my car out from under the trailer. Unfortunately, this spun the rear end of my car around enough that I impacted him again with the back of my car on the side/back of the trailer. I was propelled off the road, over the curb ( neatly taking out all my tires as I went over the curb ), over the sidewalk and well up onto the grass and into some bushes.

I was fine, aside from being a little bit stunned at what had just happened.

I got out of the car quickly to wave to the truck driver, who had stopped, along with a lot of other people, to make sure he knew he hadn't killed me. Or, more accurately, that I hadn't killed myself, as it was completely my fault. The people that stopped were just as surprised as I was that I was OK. It must have looked pretty dramatic from outside, I know it did from inside.

It was pretty much a big crash, a jolt and then everything spinning around in my windshield, accompanied by the sound of broken glass flying around.

Pretty stupid on my part. I had turned out of this street a thousand times since I moved here two years ago.

We exchanged details and I called the police to report it. There was little question my car had sustained more than the 1500.00 limit for mandatory reporting to the police. As no one was hurt, they were a little while showing up. I felt bad for the truck driver who was on the job and was being inconvenienced pretty badly by my mistake. I got his details and told him he might as well go, since it was clearly my fault and its not like there was anything to dispute.

The police arrived and it took less than five minutes to give him enough info for his paperwork. He explained how the process would work, with them towing my car away and the insurance company picking it up from them. All I had to do was leave my keys in the car, take any personal items I needed and that would be it.

Felt more than a little weird making such a mess of glass, busted car bits, and then just walking away from the whole thing, leaving my car up in the bushes for someone else to look after the whole thing.

Walked home and called the insurance company.

They had a rental car delivered to me within the hour, the claim all set up and explained how they would do an examination of the damage and let me know if it would be fixed or written off.

I have to say, the whole ordeal was pretty painless.

They did end up writing the car off, and I was fortunate enough to get enough money out of them to pay off what we still owed on it.

My insurance doesn't even really go up, as I have enough safe driving years that they give you one freebie out here without taking a hit on your rates.

Did a fair bit of shopping around for a new car and finally settled on a 1999 VW Jetta. Its not new-new like my little Mazda-3 that is being stripped of all its remaining useful bits somewhere, but its small, easy on gas and in good enough shape that I don't have to stress about it starting in the morning or body panels rusting off and littering up our parking spot. ( unlike some vehicles that have graced our spot.... )

So, theres that.

I've been studying IFR rules and procedures in my spare time, and I'm kind of hoping to write the INRAT ( the written exam for the Instrument Rating ) sometime before spring. Most likely February, but I haven't really committed to it yet. I'm interested in it, and its always challenging learning something new, but I keep coming back to the fact that since I can't really afford the flying part of the rating yet, that this is all just academic.

There's a lot to learn though, so its better than playing video games or watching TV.

Union Contract negotiations at my fueling gig are well underway and things are moving very slowly. Not a good sign, and I don't even want to think about the "S" word. The longer it drags on and the more disillusioned my coworkers are getting with the process though, the more people are starting to talk about it. It went from a absolute last resort, but no-one really thinking of it as a serious option, to now being one of the few remaining bits of leverage we have.

I interviewed at a freight forwarding outfit the other day. I've been looking for some part-time work that might help me save up some cash / relieve some debt pressure.

I forgot how much I enjoyed freight forwarding and am almost afraid of getting this job. Its hard to logically justify a career path that has so little going for it in the economic department ( flying ) when a perfectly good career is available to me in forwarding. I worked as a freight forwarder for over ten years and, without being too arrogant, I'm pretty good at it. I've been courted by a dozen or so different companies over the years, wanting me to come work for them and I've made enough contacts in the industry that getting forwarding work wouldn't be too hard.

The hard part is getting a part-time forwarding job. The company I interviewed for was interested in the idea of hiring a part-time person, but the local manager still has to sell it to his boss, so we'll see.

Part of me thinks, maybe I should go back into forwarding full-time and do the fueling thing on a part time basis instead of the other way around. It makes a lot of sense financially, but I'm nervous about it. I'd hate to put myself in a position where the money becomes the anchor tying me into something that I don't really want to do for a long time.

The Lovely Wife and I have, however, started working towards a new goal.

We've talked about it before, but we've started making some concrete efforts towards it now.

Africa.

Everyone thinks we're crazy.

We've got some big challenges with making it happen though. First and foremost, we need to reduce our financial obligations here to the point where our debt is serviceable on the amount of income we can expect over there.

Second, we both need to find jobs over there.

We've decided on a years timeframe to try and meet some financial goals. This will probably necessitate us both working full and part time jobs.

That being said, if the right opportunity came along in the meantime, I think we could make it happen in short notice as well.

I spoke with a fellow at work the other day, he lives / vacations in Kenya one or twice a year and seems very connected with the local flying scene over there. The other day he asked me to forward him a copy of my resume, as it looks like he is preparing to make another trip over in the next few weeks. Its funny how these things can fall into place once people know you are interested. Fingers crossed.

One of the local helicopter outfits at the field had their annual Christmas party for customers, friends and suppliers. They fly in a serious amount of Lobster and boil it up right outside the hangar in these great big pots.

They also spend a few hours shuttling everyone up for a ride in their A-Star Helicopters.

I snuck over there and managed to cadge myself a ride.

That. Was. Cool.

My second trip in a helicopter, and I like it and all, but I'm not sure flying one would be my thing. Yet...who knows?

We do a lot of sports-charters, primarily NHL teams, at our FBO. The teams come in and we marshall them into a parking spot, chock the wheels, get the air-stairs truck up to the door, open up the cargo holds and offload the players bags and all their team gear.

If the team is just coming in for the day and then going back home the next day, they usually have a carry-on bag each and nothing in the hold as far as personal luggage. If they are on a one, two or even three-week road trip however, they'll each have a great big suitcase as well.

The personal bags are stored up front usually, in Pit#1,2 and/or 3.

On a side note, aircraft with bulk-loadable downstairs cargo holds, have the cargo areas divided up into " pits ". A pit is basically a section in the hold, noted by a cargo net divider and usually a painted line on the wall. This allows us to load a certain amount of volume/weight into each " pit " and record those numbers for the flight crew to work out their weight and balance.

With these flights, it usually isn't much of a concern as personal luggage is almost always much bulkier than heavy. That is, the pit will be full of bags long before the actual weight is much of a factor.

The pits are numbered starting from the front of the plane, towards the back. The front hold usually has 2-3 pits and the rear, depending on the plane, could have as many as five or six.

Once the plane is shut down and the doors are open, we will marshall the buses into position at the bottom of the stairs to receive the players and occasionally, a media contingent.

Our procedure is to have a couple of guys up front in the forward hold retrieving the personal bags and placing them on the ground for the players to collect and put on the bus as they board. I've seen other FBO's handle the bags off the plane and then also load them onto the buses, but the players and team management never seem to mind our method and it speeds things up considerably.

With only having to have two guys up front handling personal bags, the rest of us can be at the rear hold getting the belt loaded into position, marshaling the equipment truck up to the back of the loader and getting the cargo nets in the rear hold taken down in preparation for offloading.

Each team in the NHL has a Equipment Manager, some of them have a couple of them. When a visiting team is in town, the home-team equipment manager will look after collecting their gear from the plane and taking it to the rink and getting it settled into their dressing room. This saves everyone from having to set up rental trucks each time they visit somewhere else and dragging their equipment crew around with them.

Once the truck is in place, the equipment manager and one of our guys will be in the back of his truck helping to stack the gear as it comes down the belt and two more guys will be up in the rear hold.

One guy gently moving the customers property from the location where it was so lovingly and carefully placed by the on-load crew on the other end and getting it in the general vicinity of the door opening and the other person will ever-so-carefully and with as much grace as a person can muster moving 150 lb crates and giant hockey bags from a crouched position with an APU screaming over your head, place them on the belt loader.

The whole thing is usually very quick. Most often, its late at night and the players want to get to the hotel ASAP to get some rest before the next days game. The equipment guy has a ton of work to do now that the gear is in town, and most of us are on the tail end of our shifts or well into overtime and looking forward to getting home as well.

Luckily, we've got a really good crew and since most of us have done hundreds of these charters, with the exact same thing happening every time, its a pretty well oiled machine.

Occasionally things still go sideways though.

Last week we had a team going out that ran into some trouble. They were using the same plane that U2 used on their tour, and the charter outfit hasn't got around to repainting it yet. After all the gear was loaded, doors closed, stairs and chocks pulled, we were all standing there waiting to marshal them out when the engines shut down quite unexpectedly.

First they called for ground power and the stairs. We got the GPU ( Ground Power Unit - airplane electrical power generator, portable ) in position only to have it waved off.

Our air stairs developed sudden electrical issues of it's own and we had to jump start it with the pickup truck ( while the windows of the plane are full of curious faces wondering what the hell is going on with their plane and now what the heck are these jokers doing with the jumper cables?? ).

Turns out they had a mechanical issue with a fuel valve in one of the engines and had to get one of their maintenance crews to come over from their nearby hangar and do some swearing and poking at bits underneath the engine cover.

It worked, as they were on the way within an hour and a half of the engines shutting down. Not much of an issue really, but its the kind of thing that might keep you there all night, waiting.....

We handle a lot of music groups as well, sometimes just the performers on a smaller private jet, other times entire production teams in chartered airliners.

The music charters are a lot less well oiled.

We've got our routine down pat, and the teams and management of the sports charters know this and leave everything to us. Every runs smoothly and there is rarely any confusion or delays. Unfortunately, the music groups are usually a lot less experienced in this type of operation. You tend to get a lot of people strutting around barking orders and requesting things that are unnecessary, irrelevant, unsafe, nonexistent, unavailable and more often than not...ridiculous.

We do our best to accommodate them , as they are the customer, but it usually leads to us veering well off course from the routine and causing problems.

The van gets sent for a bucket of M&M's for the talent and is now not available when the crew call for a pickup from the hotel.

The producer asks for a separate set of air stairs for the rear door of the plane so that the talent can board first, using the front stairs and not have to " endure " the roadies, groupies and media walking past them to their seats in the back. Now we have to rent an extra set of stairs, assign two guys to marshal and operate them.

The list goes on and on, and I don't want to get anyone in trouble, so I'll leave it at that. Have got to see more than a few famous performers, but frankly, I could do without all the headaches....

We also had a C-130 Hercules from the Tunisian Air Force come into town. They make the trip out here once a year, apparently picking up / dropping off helicopters for maintenance at one of the larger local helicopter outfits here. They loaded three whole Bell 205 Helicopter ( disassembled of course ) into the back of this thing and then took them back to Tunisia.

The Hercules isn't the fastest aircraft around, so its a long trip, you can be sure! The crew were busy down at the Walmart and Costco though, so they must have had a little bit of room left over the hold for some extra personal gear...

I won't get into who/when/how details on this one, but I'll post two pictures and leave the rest up to your imagination....

Wingtip ( with evidence of repairs... )

Hangar Wall ( with evidence of .....something... )

Sitting around in the line crew room the other day, we had a funny call on the radio from an aircraft we didn't recognize. We only caught the tail end of the call, but it sounded like a " Fairchild " was coming in and would be on the ground in ten minutes, coming to our ramp. This had us all scratching our head as we weren't expecting anything and frankly, none of us could figure out what type of aircraft this would be. They were gone off our frequency by the time we answered the call, as is sometimes the case, so we were left wondering.

Visiting aircraft are strongly encouraged to call us on our Unicom frequency prior to arrival. This lets us make sure we have a parking spot cleared and ready for them, staff ready to marshall, offload and be available to them for whatever services they require. Occasionally, we get aircraft crews that don't think this call is necessary and we end up scrambling to do our jobs, mostly because we planned our manpower to assist those aircraft that DID call.

Sometimes, however, crews plan to call us when " in-range ", but end up being too busy dealing with terminal arrival and tower congestion and/or busy airspace, non-standard approaches or other distractions that preclude them being able to quickly call us on the second radio with an in-range call.

We finally got a clue as to who the mystery guest was when, over the buildings that block our view of the north runway, there appeared a giant plume of black smoke.

This picture doesn't do it justice, but wow, this thing leaves quite the " carbon footprint "

I'm pretty sure we mis-heard the " Fairchild " part of its call, as I don't think the CP-140 Aurora is a Fairchild product.

They have visited us in the past, a giant, noisy, smoky beast. Four older turboprop engines that belch a trail of black smoke wherever they go. These aircraft are used out here for long range coastal patrol and occasionally Search and Rescue as well. One of my coworkers used to work for the CF and was a crew member on one of these things, some interesting missions these guys go on!

This one just did a stop-and-go though, landing on the north runway and then taxiing over to the south runway and taking off.

We had very limited ramp space that day, in particular for something of this size so we were more than a little nervous as he taxied towards our end of the field, luckily, turning away to take off before he got to us...

Oh, and my dog visited me the other day at work and tried his hand at working as a CSR at our front desk.

He didn't do very well, he kept barking at the pilots. I'm afraid his performance review isn't going to go well.

Sorry for not posting in so long... I've been more than a bit lazy.

My mom keeps a blog as well and we got to talking about blogging the other day. I really enjoy writing, so it is very good practice, if nothing else. One thing she suggested, that I might try for awhile, is to make deadlines and be sure to post at least X number of times a week, even if they are just short blurbs.

I'm going to try that for awhile, see how that works out.

I really come to appreciate the stamina and reliability of those bloggers who manage to post every day. One blog I've been following for the last three years, is Cockpit Conversation, and her posting schedule is very, very impressive.

It's definitely an aviation blog, but if you're so inclined and haven't been there yet, I highly recommend it.

I'm picking up my mom on Wednesday and we're going to drive up to Pemberton to hang out at my brothers place for a day or so. He works for an adventure tourism outfit that operates out of a cabin. They used to be based in the city, but found they could improve the quality of life dramatically for all the partners / employee's by tele-commuting the entire office to somewhere a lot more livable than the big city. I think this is a great idea!

This will also be a bit of a shakedown cruise for the new wheels. The Sea to Sky highway has also been upgraded for the upcoming Olympics ( more on this later...remind me... ) and has some spectacular scenery enroute. I'll do my best to get some photos for a good post on my return. Promise.